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IBM will offer free COBOL training
11–20 of 235 posts
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#12There are three main efforts in the official announcement[0]: - Forum for COBOL programmers to express interest in volunteering or hiring[1] - Forum monitored by experienced COBOL programmers to help developers[2] - Open source COBOL training materials from IBM[3] (Available “in the coming days”) [0]: https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2020/04/09/open-ma... [1]: https://community.openmainframeproject.org/c/cal…
I'm working in IBM (Europe) in a project that has the main business app in COBOL. Using Java and jt400.jar we just expose via web services the business. Even now we have in team COBOL programmers that creat new programs.
I find the main issue when you want to learn COBOL is the access to a machine as close to real one an not a simulator. Maybe openmaineframeproject is the missing link between learning and practice.
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#13This isn't the first time the world has needed lots of new COBOL programmers to burst on a single project. I'd suggest the same solution as last time: pay people $500-$1,000 per hour on short term contracts to do so.
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#14I don't want to sound condescending but why can't these systems be rewritten in a modern language? Now is obviously not the right time to do this; I am wondering are there technical limitations to do his?
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#15I don't want to sound condescending but why can't these systems be rewritten in a modern language? Now is obviously not the right time to do this; I am wondering are there technical limitations to do his?
They’d have to be revalidated. Don’t fix it if it’s not broken.
Edit: and when do you upgrade? If they upgraded in ‘85, it would be in C++. ‘95, and it would be Java 1.0. ‘05 and it would have been VB6. None of those would have been substantially better save that they would have been easier to hire maintenance programmers for.
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#16There are three main efforts in the official announcement[0]: - Forum for COBOL programmers to express interest in volunteering or hiring[1] - Forum monitored by experienced COBOL programmers to help developers[2] - Open source COBOL training materials from IBM[3] (Available “in the coming days”) [0]: https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2020/04/09/open-ma... [1]: https://community.openmainframeproject.org/c/cal…
I'm working in IBM (Europe) in a project that has the main business app in COBOL. Using Java and jt400.jar we just expose via web services the business. Even now we have in team COBOL programmers that creat new programs. I find the main issue when you want to learn COBOL is the access to a machine as close to real one an not a simulator. Maybe openmaineframeproject is the missing link between learning and practice.
I agree. I have attempts to learn COBOL on a few occasions, but it's always stopped by the fact that there are, as far as I can tell, only three ways to do it without investing sometimes insurmountable amounts of money:
The first is GNU Cobol. It's quite functional for its intended purpose: To port mainframe applications to Linux. However, when writing a new application on Linux you usually want to do things like access arbitrary files (without hardcoding the filename in the source) or make network connections. It does have nice interactive screen support though.
The other option is to run MVS 3.8j in Hercules. This is a predecessor to the current z/OS which runs on mainframes today. The problem with this is that it's stuck in the 70's (which is when the last free version of MVS was released). A lot of work has been done by the community to keep it up to date, but the Cobol compiler is the language of 40 years ago, not modern Cobol.
None of the above options are really appealing unless you're like me and have a thing for messing around with stuff in their non-native environment.
The third option is: http://mtm2019.mybluemix.net/
When signing up, it gives you access to a z/OS account where you have a surprising level of access. It's probably running on an emulator (it's quite slow) but it does give you access to modern software, including compilers for Cobol, C, Java etc. It also has DB2 installed.
However, the purpose of this option it to learn z/OS, not necessarily learn Cobol. And developing using the ISPF editor isn't particularly nice. They do give you ssh access to the Unix-compatibility environment though so maybe it's possible to edit files using Tramp in Emacs locally. I haven't tried that.
In any case, what is needed is a proper Cobol development environment that you can run locally on your workstation. As far as I understand, that's how Cobol developers normally work. IBM would do well by releasing such a product for free. However, I'm not having high hopes given the fact that the mainframe division seem to be actively hostile to any free software (look into the difficulty the community has to get even the smallest community-made improvements accepted by z/OS, or releasing some small tool for the MVS community).
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#17I don't want to sound condescending but why can't these systems be rewritten in a modern language? Now is obviously not the right time to do this; I am wondering are there technical limitations to do his?
They’d have to be revalidated. Don’t fix it if it’s not broken. Edit: and when do you upgrade? If they upgraded in ‘85, it would be in C++. ‘95, and it would be Java 1.0. ‘05 and it would have been VB6. None of those would have been substantially better save that they would have been easier to hire maintenance programmers for.
And now that they're broken, they can't be fixed. ;)
With so many legacy systems that are often in very important places, I wonder whether it wouldn't be smarter to spend money on systems converting a modern language to cobol, e.g. python2cobol. Is that impossible?
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#18I don't want to sound condescending but why can't these systems be rewritten in a modern language? Now is obviously not the right time to do this; I am wondering are there technical limitations to do his?
They’d have to be revalidated. Don’t fix it if it’s not broken. Edit: and when do you upgrade? If they upgraded in ‘85, it would be in C++. ‘95, and it would be Java 1.0. ‘05 and it would have been VB6. None of those would have been substantially better save that they would have been easier to hire maintenance programmers for.
Ok got it. But it seems to be broken somehow if they need programmers now.
Maybe write the tests first so it can be validated easier?
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#19What other languages can we expect to see a similar surge in demand? FORTRAN? In the data analysis space my bet is on SAS
Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’d have to be revalidated. Don’t fix it if it’s not broken. Edit: and when do you upgrade? If they upgraded in ‘85, it would be in C++. ‘95, and it would be Java 1.0. ‘05 and it would have been VB6. None of those would have been substantially better save that they would have been easier to hire maintenance programmers for.
And now that they're broken, they can't be fixed. ;) With so many legacy systems that are often in very important places, I wonder whether it wouldn't be smarter to spend money on systems converting a modern language to cobol, e.g. python2cobol. Is that impossible?
I guess there are technical reasons. a big bank does risk assessment. I can't imagine a problem like this will go unnoticed for long