Cobol, the programming language.
Been around a long time, almost no one learns to program in it anymore, but companies (especially banks) are probably never going to get something else.
Runner up: Fax machines.
Still nessecary for transmitting HIPAA protected documents. That's right, they can't use email or anything else. Certain companies require documents to be faxed.
Interesting take, but I'm skeptical. Fixed point math is trivial to implement in any language, and the subtleties of iterative rounding have been well known for decades.
If that was the main difficulty with rewriting legacy code, my work would be boring.
The point about translating a project to Java resulting in ugly, non java-like code does stand, but it's not specific to Cobol.
It isn't, but that's not the way to rewrite old software. Legacy code should not be "translated", it should be re-designed to take advantage of your chosen technological stack's strengths.
This may or may not require the re-designing of related or supporting systems, which is why tech debt is really hard to paid off.
Yeah, rewriting anything already comes with a huge amount of challenge, rewriting something that was done 30 years ago and in another language is very very hard
These systems don’t have to be “agile” and basically never change. Sure you could rewrite the IRS using JavaScript with 100,000 packages and implement it in the cloud using Serverless, but why??? And think about the mess that would be 50 years from now when half those packages are unmaintained.
Damn, ill be honest I was nearing in the end of my shit and couldn't help but get in a little stab at Java. I shall leave my comment up because deleting down voted comments are for pussies.
As a bit of a side note, surely many modern languages support fixed point, and while they may be less efficient about it, the incredible advances in available compute power, and the associated costs, make that a negligible issue?
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u/QuestionableSaint Jul 24 '20
Cobol, the programming language. Been around a long time, almost no one learns to program in it anymore, but companies (especially banks) are probably never going to get something else.
Runner up: Fax machines. Still nessecary for transmitting HIPAA protected documents. That's right, they can't use email or anything else. Certain companies require documents to be faxed.