

Cutting-edge IT firms need experts in 'dead' languages - g-garron
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/business/Karen-Scott-Cuttingedge-IT-firms.6819935.jp

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rbanffy
I have discovered, a couple weeks back, that the master's thesis of a guy, who
was presenting it on a Google-sponsored event, is about the tools for
gradually porting the still-running, still-mission-critical Dataflex
application I helped write 25 years ago.

It's used by a good couple hundred municipalities in Brazil to balance their
books and help adhere to their required accounting practices.

~~~
furyg3
Bah, financial apps. My current company frequently hires a FoxPro 'expert' to
do customization of a horrible financial app. It worries me deeply that there
is a company marketing "new" accounting software based on tech this old, and
that people buy it.

It doesn't bother too much that we pay the consultant a lot to customize it,
because it seems like hell.

~~~
rbanffy
I don't know how the code evolved in the past 25 years, but Datafles, the
version 2 in particular, was a very nice and productive language to use. I use
to say it was like Rails for the VT-100 ;-)

------
wccrawford
Sounds like they need to realize that some programmers can learn a language as
they go... At least, well enough to fix problems and do minor changes. You
don't need someone fluent in the language for every problem.

They also need to realize that sometimes it really is cheaper/better to start
from scratch than to try to prop up a dying system.

Complaining about the cost of programmers while refusing to do a rewrite is
pointless. You've picked your path.

~~~
dagw
Doing a rewrite of, say, an APL system without programmers with a really deep
understanding of APL on the team will most likely end in failure and misery.
So you're still faced with the problem of finding and hiring people who know
APL. Also letting some RoR hacker, who heard about APL for the first time 3
days ago, loose on your super critical production code, probably isn't that
great an idea either

~~~
jharsman
Provided you still have source code and development tools available, the
problem in cases like this usually isn't the language. Even APL is pretty easy
to pick up if you have a book or someone to teach you.

The bigger issue is that the application you need to fix is mission critical,
undocumented and contains massive amounts of spaghetti code. There usually
aren't any tests, source control might not be used and it's far from certain
there are automated builds or deploy scripts.

In some cases you might not even have source or the tools to use it, and then
you have much bigger problems. But the language usually isn't the main
problem.

------
s1rech
Summary: "We want to fill positions using ancient and obsolete systems that
nobody would like to touch, BUT we are not going to pay any premium for it. We
wonder why developers are not falling over themselves to come work for us."

~~~
JunkDNA
Indeed. I recently saw a US job posting located in a major city that wanted a
COBOL programmer to update a legacy system. I know I've read articles in the
past about how much of a need there is for COBOL programmers, so I was kind of
curious what someone would pay for one. They advertised that the pay would be
$30/hour. You could make far more writing horrid J2EE code for practically any
big company.

~~~
ChuckMcM
However, if you have the requisite skills, you can often contact these folks
and say "Sure I'll help, but my rate is actually $500/hr, is that a problem?"
and see what they say.

When you ask HR to run an advertisment like this they don't have any idea what
they are asking, they hear "computer consultant for this program" and look in
their book of "What do we normally pay consultants?" Oh yes, here it is
$30/hr, put that in there. So when you contact them and tell them $500/hr they
will initially tell you "No thanks."

Then they will tell the person who asked them to write the ad that some "Kook"
said they would do it but for $500/hr and the manager will say "Did you get
their number? Are they local?" and the HR person will fall off their chair,
then pick them selves up and sheepishly call you back :-)

------
jsvaughan
Jobserve has 4 pages of Java jobs in Scotland but zero pages of Cobol jobs.

So this story isn't that plausible.

Ok, so maybe there are fewer jobs but harder to fill? Well, when you look at
Cobol roles across the whole of the UK they are paying below equivalent java
developer rates.

So yeah, not worth learning Cobol just yet.

~~~
goodside
The demand is expressed not by heavy monetary compensation of new hires, but
by retention of low-performing, overpaid employees with extensive domain
knowledge but few other marketable skills. It's less visible, but equally
expensive.

------
nfm
Given the spate of recent pre-2000 news articles that have been posted on HN
lately, I was astonished to see (after skimming this) that it's dated August
2011.

"While our universities are turning out very able graduates, well versed in
the sexy new languages of Java, .Net and the like..."

I chuckled.

------
mathattack
"So, how do we reskill a workforce to adapt not only to challenges of the new
but also to cope with the legacy of the old? Universities in conjunction with
major employers should work together to address this issue."

I think the market will take care of this, rather than universities. It is
simple supply and demand. If COBOL programmers get paid enough of a premium,
people will learn COBOL. This is an order of magnitude more likely than
finding professors to teach a language they dislike. Even 20 years ago few
students were lining up for university COBOL courses.

~~~
arethuza
"If COBOL programmers get paid enough of a premium, people will learn COBOL"

I've never understood why it is always presented as a bad thing for free
market economics to apply to hiring people to do shitty jobs.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Its hard enough to get good programmers to write in cool languages - tried to
hire some lately?

It seems obvious, in a programmer shortage, that nobody good is going to go
work for this cutting-edge(!?) IT company.

~~~
arethuza
Pay me £500K a year and I'd learn Cobol and I'm in Edinburgh :-)

Pay me £600K a year and I'd even wear a suit and tie.

Actually, I suspect that I'd probably start writing something to convert COBOL
to/from s-expressions and automate any changes to be made.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
...now to get suits to pay that much for a COBOL programmer! They probably
would rather die.

Maybe by marketing it right - you're a C2D (COBOL to Die) conversion
consultant, ready to do the heavy lifting to modernize their obsolete
codebase...

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Oh, they already exist. ateras.com, cobol-conversions.com, datatek-net.com,
coboltojava.com and on and on.

~~~
arethuza
Aren't those just direct translations? I imagine the resulting Java must look
_lovely_!

Whereas if you had a COBOL parse tree as an s-expression it might be much
easier to write "smart" code to do the changes and then write out the results
back to COBOL.

------
asymptotic

        While our universities are turning out very
        able graduates, well versed in the sexy new
        languages of Java, .Net and the like...
    

...BUWAHAHAHAHHA. The number of serious problems with this statement gave me a
good chuckle.

------
mgkimsal
_Although a perfect world option would be for organisations to move their
entire systems to a new platform, this would prove extremely costly at a time
when the sector has seen its capital expenditure come under pressure._

Given that many banks are reporting record profits, I'm not sure I buy the 'it
costs too much' argument.

 _There are also enormous business risks associated with a transfer from one
system to another_

Yes, there are risks, but there are also large business risks in finding out
that there's no one left who can keep your systems running either. Or, there's
only 2, and each person charges $2k/hour (remember, you can't switch because
it costs too much!).

~~~
retube
> Given that many banks are reporting record profits

What??? UK banks, including RBS which is the biggest in Scotland - the source
of this report - are having a disastrous time. They're still reeling from the
2008 meltdown, are facing huge costs re mis-selling of PPI and to cap it all
are now suffering from the Eurozone crisis. Their share prices are collapsing
and they're sacking 10s of 1000s of people. They do not have money for massive
capital infrastructure investment.

~~~
mgkimsal
I thought of that afterwards. Yes, some banks and having trouble. But... when
business was _great_ they didn't do it either. Banks shouldn't even bother
mentioning "it's too expensive" because they've proved that even when profits
are great, they still won't quickly move away from 60s legacy cobol systems.

~~~
retube
Depends what you mean by "profits are great". When Goldman or Lloyds report
profits of $10bn they get slated for massive profiteering. But a profit figure
alone is meaningless. The number you're after is profit divided by market cap.
Investors want a return on their shareholding: they want dividends. If a
company has a market cap of $200bn a $10bn profit is 5% return. And not all
that will be paid as dividends, much WILL be re-invested. So maybe the
investor earns a return of just 2%. And if investors don't make a return,
they'll bail out. Stock will fall, the bank will suffer, jobs will be lost. So
it's important a bank does make these "big" profits.

It's all very well to wring your hands and demand investment in an area that
you think is worthwhile, but that profit has got to feed a lot of mouths.
Relatively speaking the profits are NOT that big. Perhaps bank leaders _are_
being short-sighted about this, but it's a whole lot more complex than bankers
filling their pockets to get rich in the short term.

And from personal experience I can assure you one thing: they will invest
wherever they think they'll get the best return. Perhaps that isn't aging IT
systems.

------
DavidMcLaughlin
> While our universities are turning out very able graduates, well versed in
> the sexy new languages of Java, .net and the like

I have been flirting recently with a return home to Scotland (from Berlin)
recently, and have found it extremely difficult to find any interesting
opportunities on par with what I'm doing right now. The quote above reminds me
why I had to leave to stay sane.

~~~
rbanffy
> sexy new languages of Java, .net and the like

The author has a very strange notion of sexiness. Or a very strange sense of
humor.

~~~
sceadu
It's all relative.

~~~
rbanffy
I consider 3270's sexy. The real thing, not an emulator.

That 60's design is a killer.

------
jurre
I really don't see the problem here, you can just hire people and have them
learn Cobol right? Sure it will take some adjusting for someone who's never
used it but after a month or so they should be fine.

~~~
gaius
It takes 6-12 months to become competent in a language. You could maybe be at
the level to make modifications in 1 month. Remember that it's not about a
language really, but a platform.

------
daeken
> Instead, the sector faces the real threat of a shortage of one of its most
> crucial resources: programmers who possess legacy skills in older
> programming languages, such as Cobol and Assembler.

Saying "assembler" is a language is like saying that "Romantic" is a language.
Are you talking about PDP-8, x86, ARM, MIPS, SPARC, ... ? Also, having spent
the previous night doing nothing but writing assembly (to patch machine code,
no less), I suddenly feel very old.

~~~
ordinary
You're right, of course, but this is not a tech site. In this case, I think
it's reasonable to use the more familiar term. It's a bit like Lisp; it's not
_technically_ a language, but everyone knows what you mean.

[edit]Or seanstickle could be right. COBOL was invented before my mother was
even born, so this isn't exactly my area of expertise. ;)

------
robryan
To have got into this issue there must have been an attitude for a long time
to spend the bare minimum on programming and patch things rather than refactor
and overhaul.

------
arethuza
Interesting - I tried three different recruiting sites (including s1jobs -
which is local to Scotland) and I can't find _any_ posts mentioning Cobol.

------
alttab
I agree to the point that colleges are shifting their curriculums. But to
think its not the legacy giants (IBM, Oracle, etc) not pushing on colleges for
"java hires" could be causing it?

Not saying any intention is that sinister, but the general CS job market is a
different market than administering legacy systems mostly. These guys will be
able to sit on that job for years.

------
perlgeek
So, how about gradually migriting the systems to newer languages/platforms?
The longer they wait, the higher the overall costs will be in the end.

------
derrida
They don't need a whole bunch of people who write Cobol. They need someone to
write a Cobol to (insert language) compiler.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Oh absolutely, and surprising there should be a reasonable consultancy in it.
But the trick is you need someone who understands both their domain (be it
billing / accounting / catalog management) and legacy systems and can express
that in a more modern system.

These people DO NOT WANT PROGRAMMERS, they want tools that help them do their
job. So they see programmers like the masons who laid the brickwork of their
headquarters, indespensible when it was built, but never to be seen again. So
they build their business logic 'tool' and they run it, for ever, and ever,
and ever. Sometimes on really cool old hardware like DECSystem 10's or PR1ME
machines.

------
jeremyarussell
There are some other advantages of having someone who knows assembly and the
likes as well. First, lets face it, if they can program well in that language
they can probably program well in any other higher level languages. Second,
not very many people at all even know what a CPU's register is, or what the
difference between big endian and little endian is, or why we should be really
really happy that we were brought Protected Mode Flat Model. Meaning that if
your one of those people that do bother to learn it then you'll have a much
higher "edge" factor for any company willing to admit they need those skills
around still. And finally, to see how bits turn to hexadecimal. How
hexadecimal matches with CPU's registers and all you really do is move or push
data from one piece of memory to another. It all gives you a perspective on
how programs work underneath it all, how the operating system works, and lets
you see things like the code beneath something in front of you. You get a good
foundation of a core technology which may one day be needed again very badly.
(Hasn't anyone figured out that quantum computers will need someone to create
a new assembly language/architecture for that matter?)

------
cygwin98
I see utter incompetency in the management lack of planning and leadership.
Though the hacker inside me find it a good opportunity to practice compiler
theories, say, write a compiler to translate modern languages to Cobol, just
like CoffeeScript to Javascript.

~~~
exDM69
Wouldn't the opposite solution be better? Write a compiler from Cobol to
another language? Perhaps C, because C can be called from any other language
and can do gotos, etc to emulate legacy control flow and other oddities.

After you have your legacy Cobol code running in a modern environment and the
frontend can interface with it, you can start gutting it piece by piece to get
rid of the legacy codebase.

I fear that in 50 years, there will be a tremendous need for programmers that
can deal with a horrible 1990's language called Java and fucked up non-
paradigm called object oriented programming.

I also see this as a problem with the companies who still want to maintain
code from decades ago. It will become more expensive day by day. Of course, to
a banker, computer programming and it maintenance is nothing but a cost.
However, at some point it will become more affordable in the long term to just
scrap the old legacy systems.

