What about COBOL?

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Makroll

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#138493 7-Jan-2014 04:57

MORE than 70 per cent of academic leaders believe that organisations will continue to rely on applications built using COBOL for the next 10 years or more, but only 18 per cent have it as a core part of their course, research finds.

The global survey of academics from 119 universities, including in Australia and New Zealand, found 73 per cent of academics running IT courses at universities around the world do not have COBOL programming as part of their curriculum.

The findings, released today, come from enterprise application modernisation, testing and management solutions provider Micro Focus, and explain why COBOL programmers are increasingly hard to locate, recruit and retain.

COBOL supports 90 per cent of Fortune 500 business systems every day and 70 per cent of all critical business logic and data is written in COBOL.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/technology/the-cobol-programming-language-remains-in-demand/story-fna12gpc-1226592085580#

What do you think about this? Is this accurate?

TwoSeven

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#962366 7-Jan-2014 11:22

Micro Focus are a Cobol compiler developer are they not?

I don't remember COBOL being a difficult language to master as compared to say 370 assembler or C. I seem to remember spending much of my time getting the hang of the hardware/OS environment and remembering to put the full stop in the right place.

I would expect a new programmer to be able to read and understand logic from a COBOL program without having seen the language before, especially with search engines being readily available. Being able to write effective COBOL code, really comes down to how much experience one has in programming I would think. Just my opinion.

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ScuL

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#962413 7-Jan-2014 13:02

I was thinking of a 1980's revival reading the topic. I haven't actively come across COBOL in at least 2 decades. Maybe specific B2B applications are still written in it outside of my knowledge.

I'd say that Visual C++ is pretty important for software nowadays

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nzkc

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#962416 7-Jan-2014 13:10

COBOL is still in use in plenty of mainframe and batch processing systems. Think: Banks, financial trading, airlines. Pretty much anything that was computerised in the 70s and 80s.

Buzz Bumble

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#962423 7-Jan-2014 13:28

It's nothing new. Even years ago when I went through university (when dinosaurs roamed the earth and COBOL was brand new ;)), they thought they were too good for COBOL. I did a COBOL course at the (then) AIT after my university degree ... not that either was even remotely useful.

The problem is that universities are still stuck in the 1700-1800's with their ideals and tend to think of themselves as high-end education and research establishments, rather than actually giving people useful work-related skills. The polytechs are usually much better at preparing people for working in the real world. Probably three-quarters of the people going through university are wasting their time (and 100% of those doing Arts degrees ;)) and would be better off at a polytech. They could always get a university degree later.

surfisup1000

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#962428 7-Jan-2014 13:50

Buzz Bumble: It's nothing new. Even years ago when I went through university (when dinosaurs roamed the earth and COBOL was brand new ;)), they thought they were too good for COBOL. I did a COBOL course at the (then) AIT after my university degree ... not that either was even remotely useful.

The problem is that universities are still stuck in the 1700-1800's with their ideals and tend to think of themselves as high-end education and research establishments, rather than actually giving people useful work-related skills. The polytechs are usually much better at preparing people for working in the real world. Probably three-quarters of the people going through university are wasting their time (and 100% of those doing Arts degrees ;)) and would be better off at a polytech. They could always get a university degree later.

Maybe it was wasteful to you, but,I found university to be a good learning experience. I guess it is how you utilise your degree afterwards that counts.

Polytechs were always around to train in specific skills, while university is to provide a broader understanding and thinking ability. People argued this in the early 90's when I was in Uni.

It reminds me of Steve Jobs a bit, who attended a calligraphy class -- while calligraphy seems to be a largely useless skill for an IT geek to learn, it exposed him to an artform which he later built into the apple computer interface.

timmmay

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#962440 7-Jan-2014 13:56

I did about 15 languages at uni, none in enough depth to be useful, and no COBOL. Universities do teach you academic stuff, not practical stuff. Grads come out of uni thinking they're experts, when in reality they're academics who needs a few years to be trained on real world stuff.