Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

I've had a bunch of recent projects reverse-engineering old COBOL code, in financial services.

Mostly to figure out the best way to replace the old systems with something newer, so not really as a "COBOL dev", though.

Anything in particular you're replacing them with generally?

I heard a story about replacing COBOL with JavaScript ... and my skin still crawls thinking about it.

There's surprisingly a lot of finance related jobs in TypeScript. I wonder what libraries they are using for money management.

Indeed, I've worked on billing system that relied heavily on pure JavaScript. Not even modern flavors with map/reduce, etc. - ECMAScript 5. It worked surprisingly well and our bottleneck wasn't the runtime but rather the databases we were constantly upserting to.

It sounds kinda crazy but with good change control, documentation, good relationship with the ETL team - it was pretty maintainable.

Heh I worked one of these. We handled arithmetic in the DB tho. Lot of PL/pgSQL running under the typescript, TS was more of like a middleware or API layer for things that could change more frequently. Finance code is to some extent transcribing of regulation & law into code and we kept all that in postgres.

Any chance it uses Rhino?

But think of the flexibility, freed from the shackles of numerical coherence!

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Crossed fingers, in my experience.