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The G-7 oligarchs are exporting jobs to third world countries faster than free guns at a prison break - A reader
COBOL could get a new lease on life
THE 50 YEAR OLD programming language COBOL is set to make a comeback, according to SD Times.
A survey by Micro Focus claimed that the average American still interacts with a COBOL program 13 times a day. That includes ATM transactions, ticket purchases and telephone calls.
What has happened is that many COBOL applications have been wrapped with .NET, where it competes better against Windows applications.
Many outfits that are running COBOL software really don't need to upgrade it, as it works nicely within the new frameworks. There are apparently shedloads of open sauce compilers that can make COBOL work just fine in Linux environments.
COBOL has been installed in many legacy systems, particularly in the financial markets, and it has remained a steady source of income for aging programmers.
However, the move towards cloud computing also means that COBOL could be with us for another 50 years.
Drake Coker, chief technologist for application development at Micro Focus, said that the future of COBOL may also lie in the cloud. Currently there are web applications written in COBOL, and there are even graphical applications programmed in COBOL as well.
He said that any significant technology with substantial business value has been layered into the language at some point.
Coker said that he was currently looking at what has to happen to put COBOL applications into the Cloud.
It makes the computer studies teachers who insisted on people learning Pascal instead of COBOL in the 1980s look like right twits. µ
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COBOL due a comeback?
Given that COBOL jobs constituted all of 16 in every 10,000 developer vacancy ads in a recent survey (source: ITJobsWatch), it's got a long, long road to travel first.
Even the venerable BASIC does better: VB and VB.NET together made up 7% of jobs (same source).
Perhaps the teachers should have been teaching BASIC instead of Pascal?
Which might be true... but it's not a great source.
BTW, your captcha can be defeated semi-reliably with:
gocr -i img.jpg -C A-Z
Not a whole lot of tweaking required.
Damn thunder woke me up last night and I just woke up this morning in a /mood/...
Cobol has never been away, so it can't come back. It has been unfashionable, which may look like a problem to those whose universe is circumscribed by fashion.
... but it's been providing me my daily bread for the last 18 years! And lately, since cobol programmers are quite scarce, it's been providing a good bunch of daily bread. Yep, there's no fancy stuff (objects, inheritability and other "modern" structures), but wrapped with some nice front-end it works fine. Actually, if it was correctly developed, lots of ancient code still run intact and a new front-end makes them appealing to users. We may as well be old farts, but our niche is very, very comfortable!
COBOL programs are one of the fastest and it's quite simple to program.
There are apparently shedloads of open sauce compilers
I'm quite happy they have managed to ketchup with today's technology.
It makes the computer studies teachers who insisted on people
learning Pascal instead of COBOL in the 1980s look like right twits.
Well I'm using Pascal (FPC/Lazarus) to develop one of our company's products right this minute.
I must be a twit!
"It makes the computer studies teachers who insisted on people learning Pascal instead of COBOL in the 1980s look like right twits".
I wouldn't say that at all. It just depends what you want to accomplish, and what the constraints are. For programming standard business applications, Cobol is hard to beat. But you wouldn't write avionics in it - C or Ada suggest themselves. Nor Web software - there is a plethora of fashionable stuff to do that, from ASP.NET to Groovy on Grails and beyond.
To use a hackneyed and no doubt inadequate analogy, just because some people are using rockets to land on the Moon and others zip around in Porsches, that doesn't make the humble goods lorry obsolete. Contrariwise, there are more of them than ever - some carrying Porsches or rocket parts.
Tom,
Well said, Sir. It is probably the case that a COBOL Master makes Excellent Good Beta Use of all Programming Disciplines/Languages, which is not something which many/any others can say with Undoubted Confidence.
This article is little more than marketing copy, ie Complete Crap. Some idiot writer takes the marketing BS of the ONLY PROVIDER OF NON MAINFRAME COBOL at his word. This guy should be fired for gross incompetence.
"steady source of income for 'aging' programmers"
This is true but I know for a fact COBOL is not the future for a career in software development for a graduate.
Proof COBOL is running in the back end and requires no changes, but this is just a speculation :-).
The real proof is that I live in London and I cannot find a single job that sites the term COBOL - I guess the industry still require COBOL to run but do not however require the skill set.
Maybe they will require the skill set COBOL soon is what they always say. Still waiting in a QA job for all that money I will get when COBOL is in demand.
Graduates you have been warned!!!!
I've just looked on Jobserve and it has 30 jobs with Cobol. Most are in the USA, to be fair. Pascal has zero jobs. C# is a tad ahead at 632 jobs.
I think this press release is transparent sales promotion. Cobol is being dumped as fast as people can afford to. That's probably not very fast but is not enough to feed most people.
A student who learned Pascal in the 1980s could pick up C and Ada without too much trouble. Java and C++ would have been harder, but possible. A student who learned COBOL (at least, the version I used in the 1970s) would be completely unprepared for learning other languages -- it is (or was) just too primitive.
The State of California still uses
COBOL for the whole (hole ?) Gov.
They call the gray beards out of retirement(?) to work on the systems.