COBOL is easy. JCL is the hard part.
On the bright side, you can generate all your JCL with Rexx.
COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
51–60 of 116 posts
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not thinking wrong. COBOL is, compared to modern languages, very straightforward. It's also very different, though, and so it can feel alien to programmers who only know the new stuff.
No direct experience with either, but, from what I understand, a COBOL application written to run in CICS looks a lot like a serverless app, with the difference that the company owns the multi-million dollar server.
This is sorta true. CICS is a whole different topic all by itself, and is independent of COBOL. I've written CICS applications in COBOL, C, C++ and even Java.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#53I 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?
The US DoD recently migrated some of their COBOL systems to AWS GovCloud. One of the steps was automated translation of COBOL to Java. https://tsri.com/news-blog/u-s-department-of-defense-mainfra...
So it's true - Java is the new COBOL.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I recently listened to a podcast episode which featured a gentleman who teaches mainframe related things at a university in the US and is deeply involved with the Open Mainframe Project. His statistic was 95% of financial transactions touch a mainframe somewhere along the way. From what I know, considering it's not "just" banks but pretty much any long running financial business (IE insurance companies), I believe it…
If you like to listen to podcasts and are curious about mainframes, get Terminal Talk. It’s a lot of fun and the mainframe ecosystem is a completely alien biosphere totally different from the Unix space we are more used to see.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#55Popup ad with 15 second delay was too annoying. Didn't read the article.
Click on the link to skip the delay.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#56COBOL was actually in the CS curriculum for my university, a fact that several of my friends brought up when the 'COVID is prompting a real need for COBOL programmers in light of the need to change benefits rules and unemployment!' stories were a regular feature on the nightly news. 'You should do it, man!' Yeah, sure. I'd already suffered through the liquidation of my entire department in 2018, the prospect of the h…
If you know COBOL and know other languages and are fluent in "current" tech, then I see nothing wrong with consulting for $300 an hour doing some COBOL. Company I work for still uses AS400, which has been released in 1988 just after I was born. We have a dev who supports it. This isn't a small company either. COSTCO is still using and a lot of huge organizations. I'm focused on newer tech C#, .NET, Blazor but I do in…
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Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#57I have seen the COBOL issue come up a number of times, and I just don't get it. Am I thinking about this wrong? COBOL seems to be a straightforward language by modern standards. Any programmer with experience with imperative languages should be able to pick it up. Learning the language itself cannot be a real barrier. The barrier seems to be the enormous amount of legacy code that has to be digested and understood. B…
You raise a good point. I can read COBOL to get an idea of what it is doing and how it is structured takes a little getting used to, but so do most languages.
However, in my company (insurance) we have 3 COBOL systems (thanks to mergers) and one is on a rapid track for decommissioning not because it is COBOL, but because it is COBOL written in an obscure framework that was never popular and also coded in a non-English language, requiring knowledge of that language to understand the business logic. We can outsource some mainframe maintenance but not that one. The other mainframes will be around for at least the next 10/15 years.
Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#58COBOL was actually in the CS curriculum for my university, a fact that several of my friends brought up when the 'COVID is prompting a real need for COBOL programmers in light of the need to change benefits rules and unemployment!' stories were a regular feature on the nightly news. 'You should do it, man!' Yeah, sure. I'd already suffered through the liquidation of my entire department in 2018, the prospect of the h…
If you know COBOL and know other languages and are fluent in "current" tech, then I see nothing wrong with consulting for $300 an hour doing some COBOL. Company I work for still uses AS400, which has been released in 1988 just after I was born. We have a dev who supports it. This isn't a small company either. COSTCO is still using and a lot of huge organizations. I'm focused on newer tech C#, .NET, Blazor but I do in…
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Re: COBOL: Thinking about it wrong
#59I have seen the COBOL issue come up a number of times, and I just don't get it. Am I thinking about this wrong? COBOL seems to be a straightforward language by modern standards. Any programmer with experience with imperative languages should be able to pick it up. Learning the language itself cannot be a real barrier. The barrier seems to be the enormous amount of legacy code that has to be digested and understood. B…
COBOL the language is pretty simple, you’re right. I learned it in a few weeks in my first job out of college in the early 1990s.
Even today, you can grab Gnu COBOL and learn the language.
What takes longer is understanding the whole architecture of mainframe software. JCL, CICS, etc. It’s quite foreign to anything you learned about programming for Unix. And there really aren’t any free or open-source resources to learn it, as far as I know.