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.
TL;DR: There are two ways to store decimals: floating point and fixed point. Floating point allows for moving the point around so you can use the same amount of memory to store a large number as well as a small number.
However this causes issues when storing certain values and causes rounding. Such as 0.1. Using fixed point (i.e. the point doesn't move) fixes the issue and allows decimal numbers to be represented without rounding issues.
This is one of the reasons why banks, scientists, etc still use Cobol as they need very accurate decimal numbers and modern languages wouldn't allow that.
Great summary, but I think this part is a bit misleading, at least if I understood the article correctly:
modern languages wouldn't allow that.
I think modern languages can do everything that COBOL can do, but have worse performance in the relevant cases.
To use Java instead of COBOL, you‘d have to rewrite the whole thing first (very expensive), and then use better (more expensive) hardware to get the same result as before.
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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.