Comment by WBrentWilliams
4 days ago
For my sins, I work in Education supporting PeopleSoft. That means that I do work in COBOL on occasion. I am not tasked with writing anything new in COBOL, but I so quite a bit of analysis and support. That is: I _read_ COBOL more than I write it.
There are three flavors of COBOL that I deal with: PeopleSoft delivered, Vendor delivered, and University modified. Most of the work I do in COBOL breaks down to reading the code to determine why a given behavior is observed. Only once (in University modified code) have I needed to make an actual edit. The rest of the times I either modify the flow of information into the COBOL code or I modify the resultant after the code has run.
Worked at a large insurance company in the late 90s where leadership touted a big benefit of converting to PeopleSoft Financials as part of their Y2K remediation was the elimination of their dependency on the archaic COBOL language, blissfully unaware that their new PeopleSoft applications were using Micro Focus COBOL under the covers. Oops! https://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/post/take-note-significa...
Going on thirty years ago, I had some experience with Peoplesoft. I'm interested to hear that it still uses COBOL, though on the other hand, why shouldn't it?