Subj : COBOL?
To : UNIXL0RD
From : Dumas Walker
Date : Wed May 03 2023 03:38 pm
> Is there actual demand for new COBOL developers? I thought companies were on
> lookout for experienced developers who are either retired or about to
etire.
COBOL - You're Thinking About It Wrong
"...[W]hile headlines might indicate the language had fallen into disfavor,
the amount of COBOL in use continues to grow, with 800 billion lines running
in production systems daily, according to a global survey conducted last year
by enterprise software firm Micro Focus. COBOL is considered strategic by 92%
of survey respondents, and over half said they expect their organizations to
keep running their COBOL applications for at least another 10 years.
"COBOL suffers from a 'major image problem' that stems from fundamental
misperceptions. When a group of academic and industry researchers asked members
of the COBOL Working Group of the Open Mainframe Project to rank the top five
COBOL misperceptions, the top opinions were that the language is outdated, hard
to learn and a bad career choice.
"None of that is true, the researchers wrote in the December 2022 paper...
Unlike modern programming languages that require specific syntax, COBOL is
relatively simple to learn. It was developed 'o be easy to read, understand,
and program for programmers in the 1960s who had few explicit training
opportunities,' the paper said."
The article goes on to speculate that the COBOL's perception problem stems from
"IT leaders" who were familiar with COBOL no longer being the ones making
decisions. It also mentions how the lack of COBOL training and programmers lead
to the issues that government unemployment systems had during the increased
system demand caused by the pandemic.
More here:
https://gcn.com/cloud-infrastructure/2023/01/cobol-youre-thinking-about-it-wron
g/381563/
https://tinyurl.com/3maz6md7
* SLMR 2.1a * "Now who's laughing?! Now who's laughing?!" - Pagans
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