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https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary... If it's so valuable to the industry that they have good people who know it, that should surely be reflected in the salary / comp for roles... And if that were high, people would learn it, but it's not high, it's arguably worse than just learning a little JavaScript
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary... If it's so valuable to the industry that they have good people who know it, that should surely be reflected in the salary / comp for roles... And if that were high, people would learn it, but it's not high, it's arguably worse than just learning a little JavaScript
You’re looking at salaries for COBOL programmers in the UK which is a small subset of an already small market.
And I'm sure some consultants can earn vast sums fixing old COBOL code, but that's just because they're consultants. Consultants always earn vast sums.
The article title is clickbaity, but the actual point is the proposal of using LLMs to translate large amounts of legacy COBOL systems to more modern languages like Java. Doesn't seem terribly useful to me. I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in P…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.
Language is easy, spaghetti code written without any discipline 60 years ago and modified in haste since is hard.
The article title is clickbaity, but the actual point is the proposal of using LLMs to translate large amounts of legacy COBOL systems to more modern languages like Java. Doesn't seem terribly useful to me. I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in P…
How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.
The language itself also encourages troublesome patterns, like all variables essentially being globally defined and untyped, procedure line numbers matter because of things like PERFORM A THROUGH B (which will execute all logic found between paragraph A and paragraph B)
The article title is clickbaity, but the actual point is the proposal of using LLMs to translate large amounts of legacy COBOL systems to more modern languages like Java. Doesn't seem terribly useful to me. I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in P…
How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.
COBOL's main value is in maintaining a pile of legacy codebases, mostly in fintech and insurance that are so large and so old that rewriting them is an absolute no-go. These attempts at cross compiling are a way to get off the old toolchain but they - in my opinion - don't really solve the problem, instead they add another layer of indirection (code generation). But at least you'll be able to run your mangled output on the JVM for whatever advantage that gives you.
With some luck you'll be running a hypervisor that manages a bunch of containers that run multiple JVM instances each that run Java that was generated from some COBOL spaghetti that nobody fully understands. If that stops working I hope I will be far, far away from the team that has to figure out what causes the issue.
It is possible that someone somewhere is doing greenfield COBOL development but I would seriously question their motivations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.
I don’t think cobol is that difficult; the problem is that it runs on the mainframe, and that’s a whole different beast. Everything in the mainframe world is both expensive and vendor-supplied, so it’s difficult to learn outside the company, and sufficiently proprietary that you’re probably not going to transfer it well elsewhere. The language itself also encourages troublesome patterns, like all variables essentiall…
The reason for that is that originally the 'WITH TEST BEFORE' bit wasn't there so what looked like the test was done afterwards actually would just exit the loop immediately without executing the loop body at all.
So the syntax totally wrong-footed you into believing that your loop body would always be executed at least once but never did...
The article title is clickbaity, but the actual point is the proposal of using LLMs to translate large amounts of legacy COBOL systems to more modern languages like Java. Doesn't seem terribly useful to me. I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in P…
This. Further, it’s a failure to continue to disincentivize roles that will support or port this business critical logic to something else. I worked at a large insurer where they slowly laid off mainframe talent over the last decade. Those mainframe salaries were counter to the narrative they were promoting around cloud being the future. Unfortunately in their haste to create optics they failed to migrate any of the actual code or systems from mainframe to cloud.
I work for a company that develops and maintains code that "no one knows anymore" which helps run the US banking system. This article is ill informed fear mongering and the proposed "solution" is a joke.
Care to elaborate on this a bit? Some details would've been useful rather than just a "no u" comment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How hard is it to actually learn COBOL? It seems like a fairly simple language to pick up, but maybe the idiomatic COBOL used in these legacy systems is particularly nasty for some reason.
Language is easy, spaghetti code written without any discipline 60 years ago and modified in haste since is hard.