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

234 points _false | 1 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.271s | source

COBOL legacy systems in finance and government are somewhat of a meme. However, I've never actually met a single person who's day job is to maintain one. I'd be curious to learn what systems are you working on?
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degamad ◴[18 Jul 25 13:33 UTC] No.44604481[source]▶
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.

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donatj ◴[18 Jul 25 13:49 UTC] No.44604626[source]▶
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.

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machiaweliczny ◴[18 Jul 25 14:06 UTC] No.44604781[source]▶
There's surprisingly a lot of finance related jobs in TypeScript. I wonder what libraries they are using for money management.
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1. giraffe_lady ◴[18 Jul 25 14:54 UTC] No.44605325[source]▶
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.