Seriously !? ... When I was let go from Parallax I had to purge a lot of things and all of my COBOL books and notes were one of them.
COBOL is the type of language where you sketch it out on paper and THEN enter it into a computer/simulator ... much like early days of Assembly language programming.
I am not proficient at all but I have programmed some in COBOL
EDIT: Just did some searching and a lot has changed... keep in mind it was more than 30 years ago when I was programming on COBOL. Right now the average pay for a COBOL programmer is less than what I'm meandering right now, so I better keep my current hat on for now.
As I have noted elsewhere, the '90s learn C and save your job was BS. As I observed and learned through discussion with some very bright non-IT types, COBOL was not going to go away. The reasoning was why would anyone in their right mind throw out billions of dollars of tried and tested code running the most critical financial systems for new code, no matter the language it was written in. The existing code may need maintenance fixes from time to time, but has been in existence for long enough that the odds of a new bug are far less than whatever may be brought in to replace it. In short why spend millions or billions for a brand new set of undiscovered bugs? Not a surprise.
@"Beau Schwabe" I almost went this route also via CHUBB in, yep, Parsipany, NJ. But was making to much more as an instructor for a medical imaging systems instructor. I liked COBOL and JCL, especially if I used a structured approach to the coding. #$@%#$ could have had them over a barrel for Y2K and now this comes up. Might be able to afford going back into software except of course the cost of living in Northern NJ/exurb of NYC.
Volunteer? I think not, they did not think far enough ahead. Old guys needing to update the RV or other toys or needs, charge them properly. Their shortsightedness is not a reason to get you to bail them out for free....
As I have noted elsewhere, the '90s learn C and save your job was BS. As I observed and learned through discussion with some very bright non-IT types, COBOL was not going to go away. The reasoning was why would anyone in their right mind throw out billions of dollars of tried and tested code running the most critical financial systems for new code, no matter the language it was written in. The existing code may need maintenance fixes from time to time, but has been in existence for long enough that the odds of a new bug are far less than whatever may be brought in to replace it. In short why spend millions or billions for a brand new set of undiscovered bugs? Not a surprise.
@"Beau Schwabe" I almost went this route also via CHUBB in, yep, Parsipany, NJ. But was making to much more as an instructor for a medical imaging systems instructor. I liked COBOL and JCL, especially if I used a structured approach to the coding. #$@%#$ could have had them over a barrel for Y2K and now this comes up. Might be able to afford going back into software except of course the cost of living in Northern NJ/exurb of NYC.
It seems to me that "learn C and save your job" *was* good advice. Yes, there is a small demand for COBOL programmers these days but is it enough to employ all of those people who learned C? I doubt it.
@"David Betz", at the time it seemed more of drop what language, i.e. COBOL and jump to C and later C++ to save your job. In other words, better learn C because all the COBOL stuff was going to go away, and soon. That was unrealistic. It was then good advice if you were going to move away from COBOL because they did not need more apps, and you would (probably like most designers soft or hardware) hate being stuck for the foreseeable future at the time doing maintenance. The new stuff was always more desirable than being left behind on the maintenance team.
It was always the presentation of an unreasonable expectation that COBOL was going to be suddenly dumped for the next newest thing. Wasn't going to happen that way, hasn;t happened that way judging by the article in question. But volunteer? WHY? What you do is worth something. Even what you do for "free" in Parallax space. You benefit from in some way.
One of my somewhat distant relatives is a COBOL programmer. He says there is plenty of work, which is good, and most employers are willing to let him work remotely since they have global networks anyway. But because of that he is also competing with overseas programmers who expect a lot less money and that depresses what he can expect to earn.
I have seen "if it aint broke don't fix it" in application when I look at the way things are done now and find the way they were done before was much better.
And as one of my math professors pointed out, there is always the "brute force" method, which may not be the best way but it gets the job done.
It's funny how often the "it just works" method is still used years later because it gets the job done.
OK, COBOL is obsolete. By coincidence(?) it's as old as I am.
But it did serve a purpose. The "B" stood for business. And part of handling business information are numbers that have to be represented such that adding 74.26 to 25.74 results in exactly 100.00, not 99.9999999 or 100.0000001.
It (and RPG, etc.) typically used Binary Coded Decimal for this. And for performance some machines (IBM System/360, Data General C-series) had hardware instructions for handling BCD and formatting.
Now .NET has the decimal data type for this. But back in the "everyone's going to C" days nobody seemed to handle these numbers consistently. So there were always issues with floating point calculations or some integer hack with the values shifted left (74.26 would be represented by 7426 internally).
erco
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COBOL is the type of language where you sketch it out on paper and THEN enter it into a computer/simulator ... much like early days of Assembly language programming.
I am not proficient at all but I have programmed some in COBOL
EDIT: Just did some searching and a lot has changed... keep in mind it was more than 30 years ago when I was programming on COBOL. Right now the average pay for a COBOL programmer is less than what I'm meandering right now, so I better keep my current hat on for now.
@"Beau Schwabe" I almost went this route also via CHUBB in, yep, Parsipany, NJ. But was making to much more as an instructor for a medical imaging systems instructor. I liked COBOL and JCL, especially if I used a structured approach to the coding. #$@%#$ could have had them over a barrel for Y2K and now this comes up. Might be able to afford going back into software except of course the cost of living in Northern NJ/exurb of NYC.
Volunteer? I think not, they did not think far enough ahead. Old guys needing to update the RV or other toys or needs, charge them properly. Their shortsightedness is not a reason to get you to bail them out for free....
It was always the presentation of an unreasonable expectation that COBOL was going to be suddenly dumped for the next newest thing. Wasn't going to happen that way, hasn;t happened that way judging by the article in question. But volunteer? WHY? What you do is worth something. Even what you do for "free" in Parallax space. You benefit from in some way.
I wondered about the "volunteer" part. If they're desperate to find COBOL programmers you'd think they would be willing to pay.
And as one of my math professors pointed out, there is always the "brute force" method, which may not be the best way but it gets the job done.
It's funny how often the "it just works" method is still used years later because it gets the job done.
Didn't Grace Hopper work on the COBAL language?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ at her lectures
as well as the first computer bug.
https://computerhistory.org/tdih/september/9/
But it did serve a purpose. The "B" stood for business. And part of handling business information are numbers that have to be represented such that adding 74.26 to 25.74 results in exactly 100.00, not 99.9999999 or 100.0000001.
It (and RPG, etc.) typically used Binary Coded Decimal for this. And for performance some machines (IBM System/360, Data General C-series) had hardware instructions for handling BCD and formatting.
Now .NET has the decimal data type for this. But back in the "everyone's going to C" days nobody seemed to handle these numbers consistently. So there were always issues with floating point calculations or some integer hack with the values shifted left (74.26 would be represented by 7426 internally).
This code does need to be rewritten, no doubt.
I'm not going to do it