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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.