Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You.

[question everything]

Ten years before man walked on the moon, a group of software engineers created the Common Business-Oriented Language—better know as Cobol—to standardize business computer programming... Indeed, despite its advanced age, Cobol is still the most prevalent programming language in the financial-services industry world-wide. Software programmed in Cobol powers millions of banking transactions every day and underpins critical computer mainframes.

And Cobol isn’t going away anytime soon. Banks and other companies have come to the uncomfortable realization that ripping out old mainframes is pricey and complicated. Transitioning to new systems is likely to take years, and besides, a lot of the older tech works just fine.

The problem is that Cobol isn’t popular with new programmers. So, with a generation of Cobol specialists retiring, there is a continuing hunt to find a new generation of programmers to service this technology... Accenture PLC is coaching hundreds of Cobol programmers every year in India and the Philippines to work at banks. In Malaysia, one consultancy that provides engineers versed in Cobol for its clients, iTAc MSC Outsourcing, has adopted the slogan “Keeping the Dinosaurs Alive.” A host of companies offer online courses in Cobol in places like South Africa, India and Bangladesh. Developing economies are key technology-outsourcing centers for banks.

(snip)

Still, for banks that expect to be tied to their old technology to some extent for the foreseeable future, fluency in Cobol remains key. While a bunch of smaller banks have successfully ripped out their old core processing systems, no major bank has dared to do so, says John Schlesinger, chief enterprise architect at Temenos , a company that sells software to banks. The cost of a major overhaul and the risk of a botched upgrade leaving customers without access to their bank accounts are too great, he says.

More..

https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-you-know-cobol-if-so-there-might-be-a-job-for-you-1537550913 (paid subscription)

[CentralMass]

1. It's been years, but I have done Cobol programming.

[lapfog_1]

2. yes, I used to teach COBOL in college... hated it

and a few factual corrections...

COBOL was invented by a woman (co-inventor) named Dr. Jean Sammet. I wrote a paper (in high school) on her and her book "Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals" that compared "modern" (in 1973) computer languages...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html

Along with a number of other women such as Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Jean pioneered the field of software.

You see, it was thought back in the 1950s and 1960s that hardware was the domain of male engineers and software was really more like operating an adding machine and therefore, the domain of "mere women". Hence the NASA women calculators (later software engineers) in Hidden Figures.

Anyway, I can write COBOL... but not willingly...

[question everything]

3. Interesting. My first courses in College involved using... tapes

And I actually remember being able to "read" some of the commands looking at the configurations of the holes.

And later came Basics. Basic? I really liked it but soon came the personal computer and the spreadsheets and that was it.

But then, I also used slide rule...

[lapfog_1]

5. paper tape... or punch cards on a "reel" of paper... (actually usually fanfold.

commonly used on DEC 10s and some of DEC's earlier PDP systems.



there were other examples of paper tape with punch holes, usually associated with teletype machine

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRFz2kgS4Ub5lhPWxNesVUmKHJu0VBx6_AJDNdxWJey4ZeG04PJbA

And the language was Basic... gosub <line number>

10 PRINT "Hello, World!"
20 END

Bill Gates sold IBM his Basic interpreter AND an OS named "Disk Operating System" that he purchased for peanuts ($75K) from Tim Paterson. The rest, they say, is history. Oh, the story goes that Bill sold DOS to IBM on spec... meaning he hadn't yet acquired the rights to it.

[padfun]

4. I took two semesters of COBOL in college in 1991-92

It is a clumsy language but is needed for old mainframes. It is a cousin to Assembly language. In school, we wrote a sort program that took about 30 lines of code in COBOL and we did it in 5 lines in C++.

Much of the first 15-20 lines are cumbersome declarations and such. Your first module would come after that. It's not very efficient but is the best for the old system.

[lapfog_1]

7. actually it was intended to be as far away from Assembly as possible

the stated intention was to create a programming language that was "English like" with declarative. The thought being that the closer to English the easier it would be to teach to people to write software... as opposed to Assembly. Not to mention being a "higher level" language, the software would be portable to many different machines... something not true at all about Assembly (or Assembler if you like).

Obviously that goal failed.

But Cobol, much like Algol, Fortran, APL, Snobol, etc was a declatative procedural computer programming language, not at all like more modern "object" languages such at Python, C++, etc.

[padfun]

10. Languages

To me, Fortran, Pascal and even modern Visual Basic are very similar and there isn't much difference. They do make it easier to read since you can name your Function, Procedure, Subroutine, Sub and all variables anything you want.

C++ and Java++ are less readable.

And you are right that COBOL and Assembly care quite different, but I learned both at the same time and I saw many similarities in some things. Like Assembly was the underlying language for COBOL. I know that this wasn't the case. I never used either after I graduated. In fact, ALL of the languages I learned In school were quickly becoming obsolete at that time with object programming becoming the new norm.

The languages I was recently using at work were the Microsoft Visual Studio (C# and VB.net) and some javascript. I also wrote some Access databases with VBA. I retired last year.

[TlalocW]

6. There was a call for COBOL programmers back around Y2K

When everyone was sure computers would be crashing all over the world.

I still do some programming for a guy who owns a small website shop and have programmed in several languages over the years since college. I could probably pick up COBOL, but then I don't need the stress depicted below...



TlalocW

[lapfog_1]

8. yes, it would be hard to have someone current with Python or something

to go back and paw through 10s of thousands of lines of COBOL to make adjustments to financial services processing.

What I can't believe is that these companies haven't (by this point now 18 years past Y2K) ported everything they need forward... not to mention the obvious inefficiency of running COBOL on some ancient OS running on a IBM 370 emulator in a Kubernetes container or docker container someplace. Only the much faster hardware makes this even feasible.

[sinkingfeeling]

12. Someday take a look at an IBM Z14.

[lapfog_1]

9. oh, and there is still another "Y2K" issue coming up

Year 2038...

That's the year that 32 bit time values "roll over"... (Unix and Linux)

so we have to look through all the old software again and convert to 64 bit seconds in time (plus another 64 for millie, micro, nano, etc).

If I'm still alive then (I'll be over 80), I might find useful employment for 6 months or so.

However, I expect that AI systems will be able to rewrite all of the software by then... right?

[sinkingfeeling]

11. Yes, I do, but retired. My 48 year old son is a programmer, who

knows COBOL, and has a great job.