Cobol has been in the news lately since the NJ governor asked for help with some legacy systems. Perhaps someone should tell him it’s worse than he thought – he’s going to need some assembler programmers, too. 🙂
Some of the recent discussion of Cobol by people who should know better is amusing if it weren’t also disappointing. You would think that Cobol died in the 1970s. The fact is, IBM’s Cobol compiler is quite sophisticated, as is the language. This isn’t your father’s or mother’s Cobol. It is a truly modern language, even object-oriented if you want it to be. On the other hand, writing business systems in Java, C, Python, Ruby, etc. represents a challenge I would not like to tackle (even though I love those languages). In many ways those languages are ill-suited to the task – for example, just doing business arithmetic in Java requires some really ugly code.
But what do I know? I still think assembler is fun to write.
One thing’s for sure: It will be fun to hear the forensics of what happened with the governor’s legacy systems. I’m guessing it has little to do with any shortcomings in Cobol.
Do you believe learning Cobol and Assembler will suit for an excellent career path?
There is a career path for programmers with Cobol and assembler skills among larger companies. Insurance companies, credit card processors and the airlines are some of the businesses that need the data processing power and security that mainframes provide. The number of programmers with these skills seems to be decreasing and it is becoming harder to acquire these skills.
I wrote to the governors of Kansas and NJ towards the beginning of the virus outbreak and said that i know COBOL and Assembler and would work FOR FREE during the pandemic if COBOL was REALLY the cause of the problem. OF COURSE, I heard nothing back.