171–180 of 232 posts
Its awful that most people here are criticizing COBOL, yet they don't even know it, but they just "heard bad things about it". In my country and in Sweden it is quite easy to get good and stable job in banking/insurance/consulting business with Cobol on Z/OS. Salary is around 10-30k PER MONTH. Around 3x more then in let's say Java.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If that's what you aspire to, and aren't passionate about software -- which is perfectly fine! -- I guess learning some COBOL is a reasonable career choice. This is a completely unfair assessment. Even if you're passionate about something, job stability and good pay are going to be the primary drivers in decisions about jobs. I doubt that most people choose, say, Java jobs because they're passionate about Java, or…
Believe me: writing Java is on average more interesting than COBOL (I've done both, including some terrible Java systems using Enterprise Java Beans -- I still shudder at the thought -- and Java still wins). Then again, Java has been called "the next COBOL", so that's an interesting comparison. > Even if you're passionate about something, job stability and good pay are going to be the primary drivers in decisions abo…
Unless there aren't.
Either way, you're judging people simply for taking a different path than you, which is completely unfair.
I've spent the last three years translating COBOL programs off of an HP3000 in to to SQL-backended web-apps and can say as a non-Programmer who was given a pile of COBOL source to decompile, I like its simplicity and ease of readability. Most of the code is from the 80's or 90's but is well commented and easy to work with and understand. Speaking of, most of this code still works or was in use until 2-3 years ago--on…
The importance of the comments in COBOL reminds me of a developer I worked with who was famous for removing comments to 'tidy up the code' The other developers then spent time readding the comments
"good stable and low-stress jobs in the middle-range of local income"
RM Cobol, Nevada Cobol, Cobol-80..., what a good old days to use those Cobol compilers back on early 90s. old soldiers never die but fade away.
Wow...Nevada Cobol. That brings back some memories. We were kinda shocked someone could fit it on a CP/M machine. Had a friend who learned enough using Nevada at home to get a job doing VM/370 Cobol for an airline and ended up becoming a VP by the time he retired.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe me: writing Java is on average more interesting than COBOL (I've done both, including some terrible Java systems using Enterprise Java Beans -- I still shudder at the thought -- and Java still wins). Then again, Java has been called "the next COBOL", so that's an interesting comparison. > Even if you're passionate about something, job stability and good pay are going to be the primary drivers in decisions abo…
> And there are more interesting programming jobs that will also pay the bills, anyway. Unless there aren't. Either way, you're judging people simply for taking a different path than you, which is completely unfair.
I didn't mean to judge people and in fact tried not to, though perhaps clumsily. I said it's fair to not be passionate about the job. Often I haven't felt passionate about it either, or even particularly motivated. And do note I have worked in COBOL, so I understand the need. I just don't like the language and I don't want to see people selling the idea that it's "interesting" or a particularly sound business decision to learn it -- like those articles that occasionally get posted to HN.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the day... COBOL programmers were often 'analysts' as well - meeting with the end users and/or management to design and then implement the required system. Funny to me how so many in this thread rag on COBOL, yet when other languages come up it is always 'well this language is good for abc but I wouldn't really do xyz in that one'. COBOL is extremely good at what it was designed for - data processing, and lot…
> COBOL is extremely good at what it was designed for - data processing, and lots of it. Well, the hardware that COBOL usually runs on is good for that, sure. And its usually (now) running legacy systems that no one wants the risk of reimplementing from the ground up. But is the language itself particularly well-suited to the task? I think that’s less clear. Certainly, I’ve never seen a coherent argument about how th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And there are more interesting programming jobs that will also pay the bills, anyway. Unless there aren't. Either way, you're judging people simply for taking a different path than you, which is completely unfair.
If there aren't, there aren't. In that case, there's no choice to be made. I didn't mean to judge people and in fact tried not to, though perhaps clumsily. I said it's fair to not be passionate about the job. Often I haven't felt passionate about it either, or even particularly motivated. And do note I have worked in COBOL, so I understand the need. I just don't like the language and I don't want to see people sellin…
That's not what you said, though. This is what you said:
> If that's what you aspire to, and aren't passionate about software
Those are completely different sentiments and your original "aren't passionate about software" statement is the statement I took issue with.
Its awful that most people here are criticizing COBOL, yet they don't even know it, but they just "heard bad things about it". In my country and in Sweden it is quite easy to get good and stable job in banking/insurance/consulting business with Cobol on Z/OS. Salary is around 10-30k PER MONTH. Around 3x more then in let's say Java.
At least for me, I criticize from experience: I worked with COBOL, and think it's an awful, unfun language, commonly used for unfun projects. And COBOL jobs don't pay particularly well where I live, either. > In my country and in Sweden it is quite easy to get good and stable job in banking/insurance/consulting business Yes, that much is true: a stable job in banking/insurance. Mostly maintaining clunky legacy system…
I leave my passion for when I log off the VPN.
Its awful that most people here are criticizing COBOL, yet they don't even know it, but they just "heard bad things about it". In my country and in Sweden it is quite easy to get good and stable job in banking/insurance/consulting business with Cobol on Z/OS. Salary is around 10-30k PER MONTH. Around 3x more then in let's say Java.
I've spent the last three years translating COBOL programs off of an HP3000 in to to SQL-backended web-apps and can say as a non-Programmer who was given a pile of COBOL source to decompile, I like its simplicity and ease of readability. Most of the code is from the 80's or 90's but is well commented and easy to work with and understand. Speaking of, most of this code still works or was in use until 2-3 years ago--on…
The importance of the comments in COBOL reminds me of a developer I worked with who was famous for removing comments to 'tidy up the code' The other developers then spent time readding the comments