The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore

every day $3 trillion worth of transactions are handled by a 65-year-old programming language major systems from banking insurance and government depend on this programming language which is one big Dark Horse it's called cobal and hardly anyone speaks about it or even knows how to use it and the entire story behind cobal it's pretty cool the year was 1959 and computers at their time were actually the opposite of this they were huge clunky and not very functional but even more interesting the programming languages at that time had two issues the first issue was that they just weren't portable computer programs in 1959 were actually written in machine code or assembler and they had to be Rewritten for each new computer now they were in fact other programming languages that were portable at the time like for however these were all science-based and they used quite a lot of mathematical symbols so it became hard to read and the second issue with programming languages back in the day was the cost programming was costly really costly there was a survey done in 1959 and it found out that any data processing that needed to be implemented the programming cost totaled $800,000 and if you wanted to make existing programs run on new hardware well that would set you back $600,000 so a computer programmer named Mary K house excuse the pronunciation she was really tired of these high programming costs and really complicated programming languages so she had a meeting with some important people and in that meeting they asked the United States Department of Defense the dod to sponsor a project to create a common business language and you might ask well why on Earth was the Department of Defense even in that meeting why were they interested well the Department of Defense was also tired of the state of programming languages at the time they were pumping money into their Tech at the time the Department of Defense actually had 225 computers with more on order and they had spent almost $200 million on implementing programs to actually run on them so they formed a committee and they sponsored the project and the goal of the project was to create a common programming language for business almost one programming language to rule them all so the committee wanted to develop a programming language and they wanted this programming language to be different they wanted this language to have three main features feature number one is that the language should be easy to use and work in a wide variety of environments from banking to governments to Insurance to healthcare feature number two is that the language should be designed to handle huge amounts of data on a large scale and feature number three probably the most important feature they wanted a language where the syntax was made to resemble everyday English and this would make it much more easier for non-specialists to understand the language and start learning it and this was revolutionary at the time to give you an example here is a code snippet of cobalt and immediately you can see how this almost looks like an English sentence which is weirdly formatted for comparison the script on python would look like this and with those three features Cobalt was born so the timeline here was that Cobalt was developed in 1959 by mid-60s Cobalt was widely used by many major institutions and by 1970 Cobalt had become the most widely used programming language of that time and it was designed to handle large amounts of data at a large scale so back in the day it was perfect to handle massive systems like your financial records and transactions and with that it became really popular in banking and insurance so popular that even in 2024 Cobalt is still being used in banking and finance according to routs 43% of banking systems are built on cobal 80% of in-person transactions use Cobalt and a whopping 95% of ATM swipes rely on Cobalt and it's not only present in the finance industry according to some blogs more than 60% of records and databases in the US Healthcare System are Cobalt based which leads to the next Point any business that is currently using Cobalt today is actually doing so because they don't have any other choice you'll notice that many companies that use Cobalt are old large scale corporations Banks the IRS insurance companies these AR small businesses so let's imagine a scenario let's say you're a python developer and you work for Bank the bank is old it's been there for a while like most banks and because the bank is old all of their business processes are on Cobalt obviously when the company started developing these systems back in the day Cobalt was the number one programming language to use and now when you look at the bank processes you find similar processes and millions and millions of lines of cobal so as the new python developer you just need to change 10,000 lines of cobalt in into the corresponding python code however all of these 10,000 lines of cobalt are for a bank so you'll be working with transactions calculations for fees and interests loan formulas and if you get this wrong if you write this incorrectly your mistake could cost a lot of money and the bank probably just doesn't want to take that risk the other issue is if you think about coding etiquette back in the day there probably wasn't much so those millions and millions of lines of cobalt that belong to the bank they probably aren't 100% documented I mean how many new companies do you know today with processes that still aren't documented and not to mention that the software Engineers who actually developed the processes and wrote the code chances are they retired or they're probably and because of this it actually makes sense that Banks and large corporations would be so reluctant to actually make this change from Cobalt to a new programming language and these corporations would need to make sure that the people responsible for maintaining and upscaling the Cobalt code are really experienced and don't make mistakes so who actually works on Cobalt now since it's a language that is not too popular or too trendy according to the latest STS the average Cobalt developer is around 45 to 55 years old and like I said Cobalt just isn't a popular language today in fact many people used to criticize it quite badly often cobal is considered a language that is very difficult to learn and maintain but to be honest I don't know why it gets a lot of hate it's an old language and yes it does have its disadvantages but it's been doing pretty well while I was doing my research a lot of cobal developers actually disagree with cobal being hard they say it's just the archaic systems and processes that actually make it hard and not the language itself this was in the experienced Dev subreddit someone asked who is replacing the Cobalt developers who are retiring or dying and one person posted what I found is is that if you can pick up python you can certainly pick up coral very quickly where things get fun is when trying to learn other things which are needed on Mainframe such as JCL IMS and db2 another poster said a coworker gave me a 30 minute run through of how it works and how to use the basics of tooling and that was about it the language is dead simple it took a couple months to get proficient but there's not much to it and to be honest I am not surprised I have a chemical engineering degree and and a lot of the chemical engineering applications use Fortran as a programming language which is another old programming language and it's actually not a bad language to pick up but it's pretty simple and straightforward when I was learning it at the time I was definitely younger and a lot more inexperienced and I was able to pick it up pretty simply so it does seem like Cobalt isn't that bad to learn it's probably just outdated and the processes surrounding Cobalt are complex because well the companies are complex I think cobal is here to stay and I'm actually glad I did this video cuz I learned a lot about the language Legacy applications belonging to large scale companies still have to use Cobalt because they just have no choice changing systems would probably be too risky and too expensive and Cobalt is still a safe and secure programming language I do think that the popularity of cobal would decline as more and more companies try to move over to something different but they'll do so slowly and carefully which makes sense why would they move well cobal is still very Niche language with a lot of limited libraries it hasn't really evolved to support something like graphical user interfaces or a big one machine learning and artificial intelligence so that may be the reason in the coming future where companies would want to eventually change but either way I think Cal's a really cool language it is pretty awesome to see such an old language still living its own life in one of the most competitive Industries thank you so much for watching if you like my content please like comment and subscribe I will see you on the next one

Channel: Coding with Dee

Views: 409,119

Keywords: mainframe basics tutorial, cobol programming, cobol online, software engineering, software developer, cobol, programming, programming logic and design, programming for beginners, cobol tutorial for beginners, cobol language, cobol basics, compsci, computer science, mainframe, ibm, mainframe computer, mainframe jcl tutorial

Id: LWYmGhIFy-A

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2024