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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. :-)
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.
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
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?