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

Not a COBOL developer, but working at a sizeable bank I witnessed the phasing out of their mainframes and AS400 systems. They ran some critical systems, both in retail and wholesale banking. They either converted to java, and optimized that code, but some COBOL code from the mainframe, and all of the AS400 stuff was converted into Micro Focus COBOL, which runs on Windows, which could be hosted on our Private Cloud. I worked on helping them migrate to our cloud infra, which was an interesting exercise. There was a very tangible cultural gap between the people maintaining and developing these applications and the rest of the organization.

Can you describe the cultural gap? I haven't really met these folks in the wild, so I'm curious what the programmers of yore were like.

In my experience, it's usually lack of awareness about modern security risks, and lack of familiarity with modern infrastructure paradigms. The latter really isn't a problem since these systems are usually standalone, but the former does become a problem - they often are from a time where this just wasn't something to consider. As a result, these legacy systems are often using default passwords, have tons of crazy stuff exposed to the network, and are comprised of custom code written specifically for the business purpose (so the documentation is only as good as what they made).

On the other hand, these guys generally write pretty neat, lean code that is quick, reliable, and directly responsive to the business. The really fun thing is watching the users fly through the keyboard-only screens, sometimes with muscle memory that is faster than the terminal emulator can update - they're literally working ahead of the screens.

In my experience mainframes at financial institutions are hidden behind IBM middleboxes that are specifically designed to obviate the infrastructure risks. It's a classic example of a company selling you both the problem and solution.