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Join COBOL's Next Generation

Posted by timothy on from the enjoy-your-tab-diet-beverage-too dept.

jfruh writes "COBOL, it's finally becoming clear, isn't going away any time soon; there are far too many business-criticial applications written in it that work perfectly well for that to happen. This reality could be a career boon for IT staff. Need to learn the ins and outs of COBOL? Your employer may well pay for your training. Just getting started in IT? COBOL can provide a niche that gets you a first job."

2 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Again? by Antipater · · Score: 3, Informative

    An identical story was posted back in February. By the same user, no less. So, Mr. Josh Fruhlinger, how much does Eric Bloom pay you to Slashvertise for him?

    --
    Everything is better with chainsaws.
  2. Re:Nothing does by AlphaFreak · · Score: 3, Informative

    Record (file) handling. To process a record-composed file in C you have to write a lot of boilerplate code (just parsing the records into its components and re-creating the records by parts) requires probably to write a specific function to do that. In COBOL you just declare the structure mapping the physical record and you are done.

    By the way, the languge has all the control structures needed to write decent code since COBOL-81. Before that (COBOL-74) it was a really ugly mess, but the modern COBOL (yes, it has been updated a lot of times) allows to write clean and understandadble code.