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IBM will offer free COBOL training

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Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#101

Post by zozbot234 »

edw519 wrote: post #100
watt wrote: post #21

It's a trap. The problem with those old codebases that governments, hospitals, big businesses are struggling with is not really the language, it's the engineering practices of that time with regards to constraints of old technology. The language is not the problem - lack of comments, bad variable naming, bad structure (little or no procedures or readability), and just sheer volume of it, is. It would be very interest…

lack of comments, bad variable naming, bad structure (little or no procedures or readability), and just sheer volume of it This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with people. For all the progress we've made with technology in the past 50 years, we've made little or no progress with any of the items in this list. The second biggest problem building software has always been programmers too small fo…

> This has nothing to do with technology

Oh, it has everything to do with technology. Wouldn't want to waste that perfectly serviceable punch-card by punching a * in column 7.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#102

Post by walshemj »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #83
watt wrote: post #21

It's a trap. The problem with those old codebases that governments, hospitals, big businesses are struggling with is not really the language, it's the engineering practices of that time with regards to constraints of old technology. The language is not the problem - lack of comments, bad variable naming, bad structure (little or no procedures or readability), and just sheer volume of it, is. It would be very interest…

Not to mention GOTO. If your one of the people who hyperventilates when you see a goto because you learned that it was considered harmful in programmer school then Cobol might not be for you. ;) You might be surprised about the comments though - depending on the age of the codebase. Mainframes were rented back in the day, you paid by resources consumed, terminal time was precious, and mainframes were often turned off…

I doubt that mainframes where turned on and off every day even later with super mini's we left them powered up

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#103

Post by altitudinous »

ghaff wrote: post #92
altitudinous wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really, really interests me as well, and I've written my iOS apps the same way too. They have no server side, no real dependencies, all client based and fully automated internally - so as well as being fully contained they schedule required notifications etc into the future without my intervention. As long as the user runs the app once about every four months (which isn't an issue given they get many notificatio…

>(which isn't an issue given they get many notifications during that four months) I assume users can turn notifications off though? Almost nothing on my iPhone is allowed to send me notifications.

Yes, they certainly can. Apple allows any apps notifications to be switched off at the OS level - it isn't optional. My users love the notifications though, and they commonly customise to get _more_ notifications. The reason it is 4 months is because iOS only allows 64 notifications to be scheduled in advance for any app, and if they want users can configure to schedule that many in a 4 month period.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#104

Post by Kye »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #83
watt wrote: post #21

It's a trap. The problem with those old codebases that governments, hospitals, big businesses are struggling with is not really the language, it's the engineering practices of that time with regards to constraints of old technology. The language is not the problem - lack of comments, bad variable naming, bad structure (little or no procedures or readability), and just sheer volume of it, is. It would be very interest…

Not to mention GOTO. If your one of the people who hyperventilates when you see a goto because you learned that it was considered harmful in programmer school then Cobol might not be for you. ;) You might be surprised about the comments though - depending on the age of the codebase. Mainframes were rented back in the day, you paid by resources consumed, terminal time was precious, and mainframes were often turned off…

I used to have an IBM flowcharting template I inherited. I mostly used it to draw shapes and didn't appreciate what it meant to have a standard you could make tools like that for.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma...

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#105

Post by selimthegrim »

lokedhs wrote: post #64
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. It's a UNIX shell. You can always use ed :)

You can actually ssh into it and use vi. That's probably the easiest way to do it. However, the edit-compile-test cycle is somewhat complicated. You need to first edit the file, fine, you can use vi. Then you need to go into ISPF (or TSO) on a 3270 terminal to submit the batch job that compiles the code (and possible runs it). Then you need to go into SDSF to view the results of the compilation. Back in the 70's this…

This sounds like university HPC today

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#106

Post by Someone1234 »

dm319 wrote: post #36
jasonkester wrote: post #13

This 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.

As a healthcare worker who also has an interest in programming - why does this comment not surprise me in HN? If a worldwide pandemic doesn't make you reflect on problems in our societal structure - that our key workers are the most poorly paid, but part of a necessary backbone of any country, and that the most over-paid workers are often the least 'key' at times like this - then I guess nothing will. But sure, the s…

“Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine.”

Which is to say that these are organizations that have been sitting on this problem for thirty or more years, doing nothing about it, and suddenly they cannot handle the load due to THEIR greed, apathy, and incompetence. But programmers are meant to queue up and work for free in order to fix it because it is now a "crisis" of their intentional making.

This is an argument for private profits, subsidies the loses. How about no? How about we eat into these organization's balance sheets in order to fix the massive financial and technical debt they let build up, because frankly they deserve it and it is the only way they'll learn. Any other solution will just excuse them to do this again.

Why should programmers bare the cost of their mistakes while they seemingly get a free ride/keep the "good year" windfall? It is immoral for programmers to profit, but not for these organizations that created these problems out of their greed? Nope.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#107

Post by soneil »

metreo wrote: post #38
metreo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortran (standardized without caps for at least the last couple decades) is current to the 2018 release. I haven't come across anybody who cares or is using it. You do eventually see a lot of older code in it in symbolic and algebraic maths in the deeper code bases still because the algorithms are complex and nobody really wants to touch someone else work if it can still be wrapped in something like R or Python and i…

I guess the thing about Fortran, to circle back to your question, is that it isn't common in critical infrastructure.

It's often critical, just in a completely different field. The best explanation is simply the names - Common Business-Orientated Language vs Formula Translation.

So the Fortran equivalent of the current situation was NASA being desperate for Fortran programmers to patch Voyager a few years ago (which may have been overblown - my understanding is that they had the programmers, someone just took the "what's the problem?" and ran with it). Orbital models, weather models, stuff that's deep science put into code. COBOL is stuff where business logic is put into code.

They're both titans in their fields to this day - just different fields. At a very, very high level it’s essentially matlab vs excel.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#108

Post by unnouinceput »

metreo wrote: post #28

Do you really want to end up in a situation where you're in a position of maintaining someone else's ancient codebase? I guarantee you this is not a path to anywhere but misery.

As a freelancer who does this 2 out of 3 jobs, I can tell you is definitely fun if you like challenge as in debug for 3 hours to only realize the old coder in 80's never initialized a structure and a newer tool was used to create the modern platform. And when you come on-board for maintenance/upgrade you are not told this from nobody. So misery or challenge, depends on your point of view, but the other side of the coin is..well, the coin itself, it's huge :). You get paid handsomely.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#109

Post by beefield »

Someone1234 wrote: post #96

The IRS, treasury, and others locally are looking for COBOL programmers. I can explain why they're struggling to find any just by looking at the pay scale: $30,113 - $86,021 (GS-5 through GS-12, and most won't get the top end of the GS-12 scale). The $30K GS-5 starting is almost as low as working for their call center which is farcical. By contrast state, county, and even city government are paying $65K - $85K starti…

> As it stands a lot of organizations aren't looking for any COBOL developer, they're looking for CHEAP COBOL developers.

This is one of my pet peeves. I am also thinking that it is outrageous that I am facing such lack of supply of Porsches. What? What do you mean, I should be paying more than a thousand bucks for a brand new Porsche? What sense would that make?

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#110

Post by [deleted] »

msla wrote: post #23
number6 wrote: post #14

I 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?

Here's some simple COBOL code: http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/examples/Conditn/Conditions.htm identification division. program-id. letters. data division. working-storage section. 01 Char PIC X. 88 Vowel VALUE "a", "e", "i", "o", "u". 88 Consonant VALUE "b", "c", "d", "f", "g", "h" "j" THRU "n", "p" THRU "t", "v" THRU "z". 88 Digit VALUE "0" THRU "9". 88 ValidCharacter VALUE "a" THRU "z", "0" THRU "9". procedure divisio…

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