If you google the word “conservative” it’ll give you a range of definitions such as “resistant to change”, “avoiding excess”, et. Which are all plausible when looking at the IT-department of a bank from the out side. Most applications are ran on mainframes and written in Cobol and PL/1. That’s a technology which has had little change since it’s birth in the late 70s (apart from hardware upgrades).

And yes, sitting at my desk surrounded by applications written in PL/1 and Cobol running on mainframes accessing the central database - it can be seen as ancient technology. However, why fix something that ain’t broken?

Most code in my department is focused on business rules. There is little utility code involved. So why not write/maintain the code in a COmmon Business Oriented Language?

Our front-ends are written in a variety of different programming languages such as C#, Java, Visual Basic and other new languages. And this is actually a problem. Each language doesn’t exactly pose a problem. However, comparing to the mainframe environment the constant evolution of runtime environments on the desktop causes a great deal of head aches.

This post is part of a series about my work place. They are currently hiring IT-developers in the Copenhagen area. Just send me an e-mail if you are interested.