COBOL: The code that controls your money. “In fact, these days, when the phone rings in the house Thomas retired to — in a small town outside of Toronto — it will occasionally be someone from the bank. Hey, they’ll say, can you, uh, help… update your code? Maybe add some new features to it? Because, as it turns out, the bank no longer employs anyone who understands COBOL as well as Thomas does, who can dive in and tweak it to perform a new task. Nearly all the COBOL veterans, the punch-card jockeys who built the bank’s crucial systems way back when, who know COBOL inside and out — they’ve retired. They’ve left the building, just like Thomas. And few young coders have any interest in learning a dusty, 50-year-old computer language. They’re much more excited by buzzier new fields, like Toronto’s booming artificial intelligence scene. “
“The Bank of New York Mellon in 2012 found it had 112,500 individual COBOL programs, constituting almost 350 million lines; that is probably typical for most big financial institutions. When your boss hands you your paycheck, odds are it was calculated using COBOL. If you invest, your stock trades run on it too. So does health care: Insurance companies in the U.S. use “adjudication engines'” — software that figures out what a doctor or drug company will get paid for a service — which were written in COBOL. “
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“At one point, his team wanted to build a way for food stamp recipients to book a meeting with a government official. The old California systems already had a section that would accept a request like that. But in the field where you’d input “when are you free to meet?” the older system only let you type 40 characters — and it wouldn’t let you use hyphens, so you couldn’t use a short form of language, like “M-W,” to show you were free Monday through Wednesday.
What a pain, Guarino thought. So he met with the person who managed that old software system. “Unfortunately, yes, those are real constraints,” the guy told him. And it was a COBOL problem; it had been written decades ago. “So what can you do? Can you make the field bigger or whatever?” Guarino asked. “And he was just like, straight up — no! There’s nothing we can do.” “
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“Being “stable” and old, though, can create a paradox — a curse of success. Because when code runs nicely without anyone needing to check up on it, eventually people drift away. They stop looking at it, stop inspecting it. And that means they stop understanding how, precisely, it works.
Certainly, they know that it works. Hey, it’s functioning every day, processing millions of transactions in a snap! But nobody quite knows why or how. COBOL has become an inscrutable mystery, a daemon that performs its tasks dutifully, but in a manner no one quite comprehends.”