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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: 0.214s | 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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slowmotiony ◴[18 Jul 25 14:08 UTC] No.44604809[source]▶
I work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there was no remote desktop back then.
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1. FlyingSnake ◴[18 Jul 25 17:46 UTC] No.44607709[source]▶
I’ve built systems for iSeries and none of the modern fancy GUI IDEs come close to the speed of those IBM 5250 terminals. You can still see such terminals in action in POCO baumarkt in Berlin.

One of the modules I saw in action was written before the moon landing, written by a lady programmer.