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GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

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Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#181

Post by ta988 »

ab_testing wrote: post #127
Misteur-Z wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until some COBOL developer publishes his pay slip, I will stick to reality, top IT salaries are at tech giants. From personal experience: BNP Paribas is one of the biggest bank in the world, top 5 if you exclude Chinese state owned ones, and they pay mainframe related jobs like shit. Being young, smart and with a whole career ahead, you have no future working has a COBOL developer, no one should spend his life pickin…

That is true, but you have to understand that not everybody is FAANG material. The top 5-15 tech companies receive hundreds of thousands of resumes every year of which less than 1% are selected. Also not everybody is interested in moving in to the tech hubs. There is still lot of work in legacy code - COBOL, Oracle and other legacy systems. Even in newer languages like Java, there is lot of work that is mostly applic…

And you have to want to work for a FAANG. Not everybody dream of that either.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#182

Post by ta988 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #158
Misteur-Z wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until some COBOL developer publishes his pay slip, I will stick to reality, top IT salaries are at tech giants. From personal experience: BNP Paribas is one of the biggest bank in the world, top 5 if you exclude Chinese state owned ones, and they pay mainframe related jobs like shit. Being young, smart and with a whole career ahead, you have no future working has a COBOL developer, no one should spend his life pickin…

> BNP Paribas Despite producing some of the best engineering talent in the world it seems that French engineer are systematically underpaid.

Yes and that's always the discussion when people from US come in to visit to the french part of companies. "Hey we heard that you are paid 5 to 10 times less than us, why do you accept that?"

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#183

Post by 908B64B197 »

ta988 wrote: post #182
908B64B197 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BNP Paribas Despite producing some of the best engineering talent in the world it seems that French engineer are systematically underpaid.

Yes and that's always the discussion when people from US come in to visit to the french part of companies. "Hey we heard that you are paid 5 to 10 times less than us, why do you accept that?"

Why do you?

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#184

Post by [deleted] »

generalk wrote: post #86
speeder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I already know: C, C++, Obj-C, C#, Php, Lua, x86 ASM, ARM ASM, Linoleum (some ASM-like esoteric languagE), BASIC (not VB), Java, Python, JS, MushCODE (it is derived from LISP), SQL and some application specific scripting languages. I started coding when I was 8, I am 32 now, and in my government-issued employer list, I had zero employers. My dad knows COBOL and MUMPS, and kept talking about how horrible they…

Getting a job or building a career in software development isn't about the languages you know. Your list is pretty broad and COBOL probably won't help. It's what value you can provide with those that counts. One of my earlier companies started with a policy against hiring folks who just knew PHP, even though that was our main language. We wanted folks who knew SQL, some JS, maybe some C or something to prove they wer…

[deleted]

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#185

Post by dragonwriter »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #176
dragonwriter wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One thing I have heard about COBOL is that it has a built in, decimal fixed point type. Very few of the modern languages have an native type like this. Having a decimal fixed point type makes monetary calculations easier to do more reliably.

> One thing I have heard about COBOL is that it has a built in, decimal fixed point type. Very few of the modern languages have an native type like this..

What modern language doesn’t have either fixed-point or arbitrary-precision decimals (or both) in either the core language or standard library?

I mean, sure, C doesn’t (and I don’t think C++ does), but those aren’t particularly modern languages.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#186

Post by thequux »

galoisgirl wrote: post #100
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #52

This seems like a great candidate for a future Advent of Code! Old languages have a special place in my heart, so doing Advent of Code with them is kind of fun. I'm doing this year's in UniVerse BASIC[0] which traces its roots back to Pick[1] which is only six years newer than COBOL, but manages to be less well-known. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25250582 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_s…

I'm doing in COBOL: https://github.com/GaloisGirl/Coding/tree/master/AdventOfCod... I'm having a problem with day 7 with the lack of hash tables. Care to share your BASIC solutions?

So was I! https://thequux.github.io/posts/advent-of-cobol/advent-of-co...

Sadly, I got jammed up with dealing with stream files on day 4, and then a C3 talk got accepted, so I haven't gotten much time to work on it since

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#187

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

dragonwriter wrote: post #185
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I have heard about COBOL is that it has a built in, decimal fixed point type. Very few of the modern languages have an native type like this. Having a decimal fixed point type makes monetary calculations easier to do more reliably.

> One thing I have heard about COBOL is that it has a built in, decimal fixed point type. Very few of the modern languages have an native type like this.. What modern language doesn’t have either fixed-point or arbitrary-precision decimals (or both) in either the core language or standard library? I mean, sure, C doesn’t (and I don’t think C++ does), but those aren’t particularly modern languages.

In don’t think that Java fits the bill either in this regard. White it does have BigDecimal in the standard library, it is both slower(because object and supports arbitrary precision) and more cumbersome (no operator overloading ) than a native type.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#188

Post by nix23 »

pbourke wrote: post #137
nix23 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say YES do it, learn COBOL and Mainframes, don't listen to others who say Mainframe is a thing of the past, it's here to stay. Just talk with leading positions in Insurance/Finance government maybe?, they are more then happy to find someone who is motivated and eager to learn, AND they have the money and time to support and build-you-up (Training mentors certs licenses etc.).

Is it possible to study mainframe programming independently?

Another source:

https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/master-the...

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#189

Post by rhabarba »

pbourke wrote: post #136
emidln wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they paid well enough, your average working programmer would flip to COBOL for a pay raise. Once you've learned a few languages, you can solve problems in any language. It's just about having the manual and maybe an overview of available facilities so you don't have to read all the docs upfront. The syntax doesn't matter for data plumbing applications. COBOL is as good as BASIC as good as Java as good as Python et…

It’s not the language but the ecosystem that’s a barrier to entry. Do you have a z series in your garage to hack around with?

COBOL even exists on Windows these days. Combined with a mainframe editor simulation like SPF, it all comes to fruition in some way.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#190

Post by Privacy846 »

the_af wrote: post #146
hansor wrote: post #62

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…

If most of programming is code maintenance, and you think of that as an anti-passion activity, your “passion for programming”—you didn’t state that explicitly, but let’s be real about the implicit comparison you’re drawing here—may be a mirage.
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