Slashdot Mirror
Why COBOL Could Come Back
snydeq writes "Sure 'legacy systems archaeologist' ranks as one of the 7 dirtiest jobs in IT, but COBOL skills might see a scant revival in the wake of California's high-profile pay-cut debacle. After all, as Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister points out, new code may in fact be more expensive than old code. According to an IDC survey, code complexity is on the rise. And it's not the applications that are growing more complex, but the technologies themselves. 'Multicore processing, SOA, and Web 2.0 all contribute to rising software development costs,' which include $5 million to $22 million spent on fixing defects per company per year. Do the math, and California's proposed $177 million nine-year modernization project cost will double, McAllister writes. Perhaps numbers like those won't deter modernization efforts, but the estimated 90,000 coders still versed in COBOL may find themselves in high demand teaching new dogs old tricks."
What COBOL really needs is a hip new framework to make it "cool", just like Ruby!
I propose COBOL on Rails. Any takers?
Mod troll if you wish. :-)
Object-Oriented COBOL, Visual COBOL, JAVA-BOL, COBOL++ . . . Functional software subordinated to the elaborations of the programming class!
California! Prepare to warmly welcome your programming overlords!
Good news: There's a job for someone with legacy COBOL skills because the State of California needs someone to update their payroll software to pay their workers minimum wage.
Bad news: The gig pays minimum age.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Crappy Old Bad Obsolete Language
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Why do people think it's so hard for a new person to learn COBOL? It's not exactly like learning Japanese: find a good reference book, write a few practice programs, and voila.
In my case, I've taught myself to use a couple of dozen programming languages over the years, and I've mastered several of them. However, I've never managed to make it all the way through the senseless boilerplate headers of any COBOL program before puking. Once the monitor is covered with puke, it's too hard to see the screen well enough to continue.
I know COBOL programmers making 150 an hour that have been on the same contract for 10 years.
They work 40, and rarely are on call.
So there is a certain appeal. Plus COBOL is interesting.
I mean C? who wants to work on 1970's tech?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All this will happen again.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
The US is about to experience total economic meltdown. After the Fannie May and Freddie Mac debacle, loans to the nation will be harder to come by, damn near half the population is about to retire, there are more people in Law, Finance and Advertising than there are in skilled trades, companies are fleeing overseas, etc, etc, etc.
You're going to see little old ladies with wheelbarrows of cash unable to buy bread in short order, just like when the Cold War ended. Who really cares about fixing these financial systems? It's just wasted effort by a nation that has a lifetime of hard work and painful sacrifices ahead of them. Why even bother?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
software archeologist
yes, and I'm a quantum derivative trader using advanced neutonian physics and I do some speculative gold-mining venture capitalism.
er. what I mean is that I own mutual funds and buy gold on WoW. But the title sounds pretty.
I'm saying that before this is finished, it's going to make the Great Depression look like a trip to Disneyland, and regardless of what you do, it's all going to go to shit and your dollars are going to be cheaper to wipe your ass with than toilet paper. But, hold on to your illusions as long as you can anyways...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Yeah, those cuttlefish are smart. I once saw a film of an octopus observing another octopus open a jar to get a live crab inside. He learned by observation how to do it quicker. Here's a Snopes link.
But if a cuttlefish is smart enough to lern COBOL, he'll probably learn Java instead so he can earn more crabs per hour. So I don't see COBOL cuttlefish flooding the market yet.
I might have a slight hurdle learning the syntax, but already knowing how to code and knowing several languages (BASIC, FORTRAN, C, C++, C#, Java, PL/SQL, T-SQL, etc.) means that a loop is a loop whether it's a FOR i=1 to 15 type loop or a for(int i=1; i [lt] 15; i++) type loop.
Except that the second one only goes to 14.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
most programming languages are human comprehensible... provided you've been trained in them.
Haven't worked in Perl much, have we?
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
What about digging out the dirt?
Yeah I'm a software gossip columnist/tabloid journalist/perv