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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: 0.227s | 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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accrual ◴[18 Jul 25 14:40 UTC] No.44605162[source]▶
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.

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1. nobodyandproud ◴[18 Jul 25 16:11 UTC] No.44606404[source]▶
Any chance it uses Rhino?