COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
1–10 of 116 posts
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#2Popup ad with 15 second delay was too annoying. Didn't read the article.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#3Even after a 44% bump, the salaries for COBOL positions aren't impressive compared to other specialties. And that's before the quality-of-life question.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#4COBOL is easy. JCL is the hard part.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#5Ya Cobol is the future!
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#6People that have not been exposed to legacy industries (banking, insurance, etc) would simply not believe how many of these large/huge companies run the majority of their business on an IBM mainframe running COBOL code. I've seen it firsthand and I didn't believe it. For them, it just works.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#7I'm pretty sure I'm thinking about it right. How much COBOL code can run on a regular Ubuntu machine? What's the package manager for OSS packages? What test frameworks are in common use?
You know you're in trouble when "There's a syntax file for VSCode." is the height of your modernity.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#8COBOL is easy. JCL is the hard part.
COBOL is good for dealing with money because it was built with the sort of numeric types required as a natural part of the language. Popular programming languages treat them as an afterthought and provide awkward library functions, if they have anything at all.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#9People that have not been exposed to legacy industries (banking, insurance, etc) would simply not believe how many of these large/huge companies run the majority of their business on an IBM mainframe running COBOL code. I've seen it firsthand and I didn't believe it. For them, it just works.
One of the slides by some IBM consultants presenting at the financial firm I used to work stated "Western Civilization runs on the mainframe." Considering how much banks still use mainframes, this is probably true.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#10I'm pretty sure I'm thinking about it right. How much COBOL code can run on a regular Ubuntu machine? What's the package manager for OSS packages? What test frameworks are in common use? You know you're in trouble when "There's a syntax file for VSCode." is the height of your modernity.
> How much COBOL code can run on a regular Ubuntu machine?
All of it. GNU Cobol exists, as do proprietary solutions from companies like Micro Focus that target the JVM and .NET (which is what you're looking for for a real COBOL solution).
But why is it so important to run COBOL on Ubuntu? If you need Linux, create a Linux LPAR on your mainframe.
> What's the package manager for OSS packages?
COBOL code runs Western civilization. Not having muh NPM is a feature, not a bug.
> You know you're in trouble when "There's a syntax file for VSCode." is the height of your modernity.
Dude. COBOL has entire modern IDEs written for it.