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IBM will offer free COBOL training

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Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#181

Post by sjburt »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #175
Bayart wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. ;) I don't know, at this point seeing a GOTO in my « native language » (the C language) is so incredibly weird that my first thought is « this guy is trying to do something weird and interesting ». It just wouldn't cross my mind somebody would be u…

Really? Not trying to be derisive, just surprised. One of the common paradigms in C is GOTO for cleanup and error handling. I know it can be avoided if you really try however when used correctly, it can greatly improve the readability of code.

C gotos are scoped to the function, making them fairly reasonable to use. COBOL and FORTRAN have global gotos.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#182

Post by zepearl »

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…

> But as time passed and computer time became cheaper many of those formal development practices started to get lax.

I agree.

~15-20 years ago we used to have some teams which were specialized in creating flowcharts for anything that had to be implemented.

Nowadays I do a bit of everything (project mgmt, development, support, analysis, etc...) and in my area I'm the only one drawing logical overviews (very primitive stuff - I use "MS Visio" and I like it a lot) whenever we have to implement something that has the potential to become a bit challenging => so far I've always been very happy of having done that (all conflicts/complications/flaws/etc... of the proposed logic are then caught already at that stage, therefore no problems later during the core dev phase and we have as well less problems with the resulting implementations).

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#183

Post by msla »

Koshkin wrote: post #164
augustk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I work with a large APL codebase and the main problem is not the language but the culture. Overly long expressions, one-letter variable names, gotos etc. make the code obfuscated.

> one-letter variable names Just like in math!

Except in math, the notation is surrounded by natural-language prose which carries the brunt of the semantic load.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#184

Post by jpindar »

Cyberdog wrote: post #88
quickthrower2 wrote: post #46

Next: COBOL 30 day bootcamp with guaranteed job at the end.

I'd say yes to that in a heartbeat. Thirty days is probably not enough to someone new to programming, but to experienced programmers in various other languages it's probably enough to get the basics down and get over the "know just enough to be dangerous" hump. If these orgs desperate for devs want to put their money where their mouth is and start a program like that, hit me up. Sure.

Same here.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#185

Post by jpindar »

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.

I have some experience at porting ancient software to more modern languages, and I found it very satisfying.

Maintaining it as it is, without the authority to document and refactor it might not be as much fun though.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#187

Post by quaquaqua1 »

marktangotango wrote: post #135
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…

This is exactly true. The pay is this low because there is a glut of cheap cobol developers in the US due to decades of off shoring. There have been 2000+ cobol developers laid off here over the past 5 years alone (medium midwest metro).

There cannot simultaneously be a surplus of COBOL developers and a shortage of COBOL developers.

Well, supposedly there could be one in the Midwest and one in NJ, but theoretically those who do not have a job in the Midwest would be motivated to move, since their only options are:

A) Remain jobless in Midwest.

B) Switch careers in Midwest.

C) Move to NJ for immediately available position.

The bigger question is why does a COBOL dev accept work for 60k when they could make 120k in Javascript?

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#188

Post by lonelappde »

sjburt wrote: post #181
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Not trying to be derisive, just surprised. One of the common paradigms in C is GOTO for cleanup and error handling. I know it can be avoided if you really try however when used correctly, it can greatly improve the readability of code.

C gotos are scoped to the function, making them fairly reasonable to use. COBOL and FORTRAN have global gotos.

Real programmers use INTERCAL's COME FROM

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#190

Post by ptx »

msla wrote: post #179
ptx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks a lot like Visual Basic, except it allows you to name the patterns. sub letters dim char as string do char = inputbox("Enter lower-case character or digit. No data ends.") select case char case "a", "e", "i", "o", "u" msgbox "The letter " & char & " is a vowel." case "b", "c", "d", "f", "g", "h", _ "j" to "n", "p" to "t", "v" to "z" msgbox "The letter " & char & " is a consonant." case "0" to "9" msgbox ch…

> That looks a lot like Visual Basic, except it allows you to name the patterns. More to the point, it allows you to keep the patterns near the variable declaration, so you can reuse them. The pattern matching is part of how the data is declared.

Can you also reuse them for different variables, if you want to store two of these chars? This program appears to have the patterns declared as part of the variable declaration.
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