From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: wobblygong at gmail.com (Wesley Parish) Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2020 20:18:39 +1200 Subject: [COFF] COBOL. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I have on the odd occasion scratched my head over COBOL. It's a denary/decimal instead of a binary, octal or hexidecimal number system, and it's a real number system instead of integer and floating point. That should indicate just who its target is. It's also wordy. I think it could do with pruning. The OpenCOBOL Programmers Guide is perhaps the easiest way to gain an understanding of it. As far as the back-end being ISAM or VSAM - iterations of the same (indexed/virtual) sequential access method - someone could make a fortune writing a utility to transfer the databases over to a relational database so that the sequential access would no longer be a bottleneck. It would be a pain of course unless you knew mainframes, access methods and relational databases, but it would be doable. My 0.02c worth. (Don't spend it all at once. :) Wesley Parish On 4/14/20, Dan Cross wrote: > So I imagine that most readers of this list have heard that a number of US > states are actively looking for COBOL programmers. > > If you have not, the background is that, in the US, a number of > unemployment insurance systems have mainframe backends running applications > mostly written in COBOL. Due to the economic downturn as a result of > COVID-19, these systems are being overwhelmed with unprecedented numbers of > newly-unemployed people filing claims. The situation is so dire that the > Governor of New Jersey mentioned it during a press conference. > > This has led to a number of articles in the popular press about this > situation, some rather sensational: "60 year old programming language > prevents people filing for unemployment!" E.g., > https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html > > On the other hand, some are rather more measured: > https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/cobol-programmers-answer-call-unemployment-benefits-systems > > I suspect the real problem is less "COBOL and mainframes" and more > organizational along the lines of lack of investment in training, > maintenance and modernization. I can't imagine that bureaucrats are > particularly motivated to invest in technology that mostly "just works." > > But the news coverage has led to a predictable set of rebuttals from the > mainframe faithful on places like Twitter; they point out that COBOL has > been updated by recent standards in 2002 and 2014 and is being unfairly > blamed for the present failures, which arguably have more to do with > organizational issues than technology. However, the pendulum seems to have > swung too far with their arguments in that they're now asserting that COBOL > codebases are uniformly masterworks. I don't buy that. > > I find all of this interesting. I don't know COBOL, nor all that much about > it, save for some generalities about its origin and Grace Hopper's > involvement in its creation. However, in the last few days I've read up on > it a bit and see very little to recommend it: the type and scoping rules > are a mess, things like the 'ALTER' statement and the ability to cascade > procedure invocations via the 'THRU' keyword seem like a recipe for > spaghetti code, and while they added an object system in 2002, it doesn't > seem to integrate with the rest of the language coherently and I don't see > it doing anything that can't be done in any other OO language. And of > course the syntax is abjectly horrible. All in all, it may not be the cause > of the current problems, but I don't know why anyone would be much of a fan > of it and unless you're already sitting on a mountain of COBOL code (which, > in fairness, many organizations in government, insurance and finance > are...) I wouldn't invest in it. > > I read an estimate somewhere that there are something like 380 billion > lines of COBOL out there, and another 5 billion are written annually > (mostly by body shops in the BRIC countries?). That's a lot of code; surely > not all of it is good. > > So....What do folks think? Is COBOL being unfairly maligned simply due to > age, or is it really a problem? How about continued reliance on IBM > mainframes: strategic assets or mistakes? > > - Dan C. > > (PS: I did look up the specs for the IBM z15. It's an impressive machine, > but without an existing mainframe investment, I wouldn't get one.) >