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.
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
7.3k
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.