11–20 of 116 posts
I'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.
COBOL 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.
'You should do it, man!' Yeah, sure. I'd already suffered through the liquidation of my entire department in 2018, the prospect of the heat around COBOL dying down and facing that once again with the additional stain of 'oh, what've you been doing? Cool, popular JS frameworks? No, COBOL? Pass.' on my CV during my next round of interviews didn't seem at all appealing.
That mentality should set the expectation for anyone looking into a COBOL job. It's not just this job, it's the next one.
People 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.
From what I know, considering it's not "just" banks but pretty much any long running financial business (IE insurance companies), I believe it's one of the most used but least talked about technologies out there.
I have never written cobol, but I wonder if there is a market for a COBOL transpiler to something like C#/Java/typescript, or even python would be a viable business?
I distinctly remember at the time really enjoying learning to code in it - it spoke to my logical-thinking (but quite young) brain a lot.
However, after college, for whatever reason I didn't use that COBOL knowledge at all. If only I knew then what I know today - that COBOL is still somewhat in demand and that if only I kept in with it over the years, I could quite probably have made quite a good living from it.
Young me was quite naive and silly ;)
People 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.
We live in a world where many of the software languages we use really do matter. If all Ruby interpreters disappeared overnight it would cause global havoc. Real panic. Trillions of dollars of damage.
But because we've learned to rely on these languages continued existence we can undervalue any one of them, including COBOL. I don't because I've thought about it and concluded that we're essentially building on things akin to writing or mathematics. Our building blocks are vital, even if they're easy to take for granted.
Unrealistic. This would be equivalent to 100.000 linux kernels.
I have never written cobol, but I wonder if there is a market for a COBOL transpiler to something like C#/Java/typescript, or even python would be a viable business?
https://tsri.com/news-blog/u-s-department-of-defense-mainfra...