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by slowmotiony 673 days ago
I worked for two very big banks in europe and we have lots of cobol batch jobs that were written like 30 or 40 years ago.
1 comments

How many objects without source did you find there ?

In the 80s (and probably before), every system I worked on had at least one critical COBOL program missing source code.

I am wondering if you noticed the same with this project.

I did some contracting for a retail bank a good while back and the COBOL source for the term deposit interest calculation routine had been lost a few decades earlier but was still in use. I suggested a rewrite but there was no enthusiasm/support for it - especially as my prototype could not exactly reproduce the rounding. Nobody wanted to have to deal with customer communications to explain why one cent of interest was being paid a month earlier or later than before.
> suggested a rewrite but there was no enthusiasm/support for it

Been there :)

Yes, you always get a "no" for doing that.

Ahaha I'm also working with a bank and "customer communications" is a really nice euphemism for "barrage of class action suits". I'm sitting here in the office laughing out loud.
Missing source code? That's terrifying.
Par for the course.
Totally normal, happened all the time :))