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New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

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Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#11

Post by Aloha »

vikramkr wrote: post #4

How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help

I didnt find it too hard, I played with it a little in the IBM master the mainframe challenge.

The hardest part for me, is IO was not handled by the application, so all your file IO was setup by the JCL job that called the cobol program, which just feels weird.

It's actually quite easy to read, and much closer to plain english than say, C.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#12

Post by NikolaNovak »

vikramkr wrote: post #4

How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help

Programming a net new isolated Cobol may not be difficult for experienced programmer.

Difficulty (and/or downright hate, for many;) lies in

1. Ecosystem - obscure libraries rules and os that don't jive with posix-like mindset

2. Legacy code - having to dig into a ginormous monolithic program and figure out what some obscure pieces of code do, untouched and undocumented by anybody in your team, with ridiculous interdependencies and complexities.

So it tends to be more of "how hard is Cobol in this particular application for this specific client" :-/

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#13

Post by vaidhy »

I used to work on mainframe COBOL during the Y2K times. While the language is easy to pick up and the OS specific things are not too hard, the style of programming can lead to issues. Typically, shared data structures are often stored in separate files called copybooks and they can be hard to track down. Most of the code is not in any source control repositories which means no one knows which is the actual deployed version. It was all fun times then..

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#14

Post by wolco »

vikramkr wrote: post #4

How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help

Not too hard but a little unforgiving. JCL was harder to deal with.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#16

Post by _delirium »

c3534l wrote: post #15

The point at which the government should have rewritten their COBOL systems into a language that would have a talent pool to draw from was at least 30 years ago.

There's a claim in one of the reply threads that they contracted HP to build a replacement years ago, but the project didn't succeed: https://twitter.com/tradel/status/1246526465207869440

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#17

Post by ravenstine »

Analemma_ wrote: post #9
vikramkr wrote: post #4

How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help

The thing about old COBOL systems is, the language isn't the problem. Snark aside, it isn't that bad. The major issue is the code written in it. Remember, a lot of COBOL code comes from a time before a lot of programming best practices were discovered. Structured programming-- as in, actually having function calls instead of just GOTO statements everywhere-- was a novel hoity-toity concept when COBOL first existed. R…

That, and I don't imagine there's any tests written for a lot of these systems. :(

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#18

Post by zozbot234 »

vaidhy wrote: post #13

I used to work on mainframe COBOL during the Y2K times. While the language is easy to pick up and the OS specific things are not too hard, the style of programming can lead to issues. Typically, shared data structures are often stored in separate files called copybooks and they can be hard to track down. Most of the code is not in any source control repositories which means no one knows which is the actual deployed v…

COBOL copybooks are just .h files basically.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#19

Post by Spooky23 »

c3534l wrote: post #15

The point at which the government should have rewritten their COBOL systems into a language that would have a talent pool to draw from was at least 30 years ago.

Easier said than done.

UI is mostly federally funded so they need to coordinate with them, and the complexity of the business rules and minimal funding during good times makes it a difficult task.

Also these systems generally work well, and it’s hard to fix things that aren’t broken. They just cannot handle the never before seen volume — it’s unlikely that a more modern enterprise system would either.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#20

Post by gecko »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #12
vikramkr wrote: post #4

How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help

Programming a net new isolated Cobol may not be difficult for experienced programmer. Difficulty (and/or downright hate, for many;) lies in 1. Ecosystem - obscure libraries rules and os that don't jive with posix-like mindset 2. Legacy code - having to dig into a ginormous monolithic program and figure out what some obscure pieces of code do, untouched and undocumented by anybody in your team, with ridiculous interde…

Is there any way to learn the ecosystem? Last time I looked, you couldn’t just spin up z/OS in VMware and start hacking, which made it hard for me to figure out how I’d actually learn.
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