More on the Systemic Risk of Bank IT Systems

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Sounds sorta strawman to me.

Are there really any IT people out there who suggest that rewriting bank software is 'trivial'? If there are, they must be godlike coders. But, at the same time

COBOL, PL/I etc. do not support modern concepts like objects, polymorphism or anything else.

So what? Those are all things that have evolved since to make things EASIER. Those programs written in COBOL are already more tedious and bloated than any programming that will replace them. You don't want to go object oriented? Fine, just rewrite everything into C. It's decades old, but still works a lot better, and there are still more C coders around than COBOL coders. Once it's in C, THEN if you want to go object oriented, you can move it over into C++ pretty easily.

Yes, it's going to be a big job, and yes, it's going to take a lot of time. But that's no real excuse for not updating archaic systems to at least be only a few decades out of date instead of a half century or so.