COBOL? A Blast from the Past

The Times has an article on the problems facing the California state government because their IT systems are inflexible:

“In 2003, my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such a task[i.e. changing wages and terminating employees],” Mr. Chiang told a State Senate committee on Monday. “And after 12 months, we stopped without a feasible solution.”

David J. Farber, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said using Cobol was roughly equivalent to having “a television with vacuum tubes.”

“There are no Cobol programmers around anymore,” Mr. Farber said. “They retired centuries ago.”

Mr. Farber said California was not alone in having out-of-date systems — or handy excuses.

“It’s old technology, and you can’t find a repairman who knows how to fix it,” he said. “It also a neat way of figuring how not to get your salary cut.”

It's true enough--Craigslist doesn't show any COBOL listings in its jobs section. But Microfocus, which used to have a PC COBOL, has this language in a current blurb (from a press release announcing a conference in 2009):

"COBOL, the most pervasive language in global IT infrastructures, will take its place at the forefront of this discussion. COBOL applications will become available as internet-based services, operating in the new cloud-based paradigms in the very near future, bringing major implications for the developer community."

And the more important fact is, regardless of the computer language, IBM 360 Assembler, COBOL or whatever, it's the way the system was designed that's at fault. When it was designed (assuming it was, rather than just growing), no one provided for the flexibility. (Or, maybe not, maybe it's a bluff. Arnold should call it--freeze all pay raises until they figure out how to do pay decreases).

[Updated: Found an interesting discussion at slashdot going over many of these issues. The meat is that what Arnold wants to do is pay only minimum for the period during which he's fighting with the legislature over the budget, calculate and hold the difference in escrow, and once the dust settles disburse the back pay. Also some interesting bits about how CA operates.

This sort of issue is also why the added money for FSA--modernizing software is difficult. Particularly when managers don't know what they're doing.}