Why cobol is used in mainframe

The shortage of resources is leaving limited windows of opportunity to complete scheduled upgrades to products prior to their End of Support.

Like modern developer communities, most legacy mainframe languages maintain active community forums , but according to Brandon:. This lack of knowledge, lack of ability to translate concepts into digestible bites for modern developers, and the lack of macro demand are what threaten companies using them the most. Open Mainframe Project is an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared toolsets and resources. In response to the call out by public sector officials, they created:.

There are several benefits to learning a legacy mainframe language:. Especially in comparison to widely available and commodified skills on more popular platforms such as mobile and web. Unfortunately, working in the financial sector or for government agencies may not have the same appeal as Facebook and Google. The recent surge in unemployment claims has put enormous demands on older systems that rely on COBOL. With situations like this, the demand for state government systems to upgrade their code increases.

Certain major corporations and businesses in the financial sector may continue to find that COBOL is a stable language for their systems to rely on.

But, for now, the spotlight is on government agencies to quickly maintain, update or replace COBOL systems that are experiencing technical issues. Human skills like collaboration and creativity are just as vital for DevOps success as technical expertise.

This DevOps Institute report explores current upskilling trends, best practices, and business impact as organizations around the world make upskilling a top priority. These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion. See an error or have a suggestion? Please let us know by emailing blogs bmc. She studied literary theory as part of a master's program and assistantship at UCF.

She recently published 3 books on Amazon, including "Beach City," a non-fiction novella about moving from Southern California to Florida. June 5, 4 minute read. It takes 90 lines of JCL to get it to run. But it can be done, if needed. Christian — if you have not discovered it by now: Success in coding is not about which language you code in.

It is about your ability to build solutions that solve problems. If you are not a problem solver, you can pick any language and you will not cut it. Statements like we used to write in High school to execute a certain task before going on to the computer to run it nostalgic. To those who are taking a Swipe at the language, there is a always the best tool for the job An excellent programmer knows this axiom.

Every once in a while someone will write an article about how there is a desperate need for COBOL programmers. Many large companies with huge commitments to old mainframe technology have done the math and discovered it is more cost effective to just run the mainframes rather than convert.

COBOL code represents the codified requirements for a business or government. Basically the fundamental rules for the organization on some pretty important processing. Crickets indeed.

The answers….. I just say OK well good luck then. I was pretty good at it too. If someone wants to pay silly money to get me back, no problem! Different from many comments here. I do not want to judge whether it is good or bad. I just want to say it is just a programming language with its own uniqueness. I work with spring boot, angular. For me it is not about the programming language. But it is about whether you are basically a software developer or not. If you are, the programming language is just a tool for you to express your logical thinking.

Retrieving the data from the IBM iSeries box and present it out as a web. In Chinese there is a saying, black cat or white cat, as long as the cat can catch a mouse is a good cat.

As a retired Cobol programmer I can tell you that it is an excellent language. Each line is easy to learn to recruit new developers, unlike C for example. It also solved problems decades before others, like database data integrity.

Well, blow me down. Unfortunately, lots of people with little or no skill write IT also. SQL is excellent for what it is designed to do. You make a great point. It seems very easy to make lots of mistakes delete Customers; with no where clause comes to mind… if you just pick it up and try to code without actually learning the language properly. My older brother works with SQL frequently and it obviously has its uses.

After destroying hundreds of punched cards due to typos. I never wanted to use it again I am not the greatest typist and the punch card machines at school were over used. I coded it for over close to 20 years after all.

Goodbye stupid green screen editor. Microfocus for Unix and hello Oracle. Then I caught the object oriented bug and went Java,. NET web apps and never looked back. Well not entirely about 5 years ago I jumped back into Microfocus but I soon realized how going back and accepted limitations with tools was not fun.

Sort of as a supplemental income. Its all or nothing. I envisioned converting tons of COBOL legacy to other architectures but to my surprise that only happened in a few contracts. I seem to recall a mainframe programmer friend of mine 25 years ago telling me the key detail was to avoid ever working on the mainframe when possible.

Of course, he also had security clearance, having served in the navy for some years. COBOL is a wonderful language if you look at it correctly. WIth the additions of so many things to COBOL since, the 90's it has become easier and more difficult to get the basics done when comparing to the more recent languages because most of the "cool" libraries are not available for COBOL. Also remember that bad developers are can write bad code in any language.

A language that allows for GOTO and PERFORM-THROUGH can be horribly misused and show the original definition of spaghetti code; couple this with a language that uses "short" lines, "hidden" periods and is vertically verbose it makes for a distressing workplace if you jump into it now with "modern" ideas on how things should be done and expectations around what an IDE should be able to do for you.

A thing to remember about the companies that need COBOL programmers now is that in many cases the code they are attempting to support is written for an older version of COBOL, which means some of the more useful constructs aren't available, hence extra cruft was needed to accomplish "simple" things.

It is also common for COBOL consultants to write "bad" COBOL code so that only they can fix it; now this isn't a new thing in the consulting industry, but in a niche market like COBOL the competition can be fierce for almost non-existent contracts depending on your pricing requirements. What is your reasoning behind it? My big success in COBOL was to have one of my suggestions included in one of the proposed standards either or the one after It was to allow file connectors to be passed as parameters.

No thanks. Companies and governments just need to replace their primordial software with something, nearly anything, written in at least a semi-modern language. How about using a current picture of a IBM Mainframe, like their new z Where are all those promised job postings?

Makes no sense. The language is not the issue It never is for any programming by the way, since the difficulty is the custom libraries, environment frameworks. Would appreciate any ideas, about whether even I go through the udemy or other classes.

What are my chances of getting a job? I have years of experience programming and tech with Linux and not afraid of green terminals :. Wow, its been a few years and yet yet I can still read that code and tell exactly what it is doing.

Given all the challenges of finding qualified people that keep popping up perhaps the focus should be on converting from COBOL to some new language for the future. The biggest challenge would be finding someone who is able to move from a procedural language to an object oriented one and yet be good at both.

My first comment ever,any blog, however this deeply touches my heart. I have worked in Java, C. I have taught VB. Net at local colleges. I have been a team lead, technical lead, and project lead.

They want you to know obscure software packages that you would only know if you already worked there. Sorry to vent. Just worried about the family. How long have I been looking? Over 1 year. Not lying. I am not sure what is your experience in Cobol because u only describe simple hello world.

It very depends if Business understand what language do they need. Or maybe Cobol is only used for integration because other part of code core parts were written in Cobol. So testing is the most important We are happy to audit that code and help. There are reason why Cobol should be still maintain because there is so much logic in Cobol and no one would like to guaranty that new code will be working.

Great article. Used the END-. This article is definitely a worth reading. But later moved to Java and now working in JavaScript. I am looking forward to end my career in , so I can claim to have worked for 50 years and almost my entire career in IBM Mainframes! To all out there, the important thing is to be doing what you like and enjoy it. Keep going strong. I started in computers as an IBM operator for NASA and moved to programming, analysis, system design, architecture, management, security and disaster recovery.

My last project 10mil lines of code was written in JAVA mixed with a hodgepodge of vendor software. The detail design, coding and implementation was a complete failure. Experience has shown JAVA is a very poor language for business and hard to implement on a large scale.

JAVA is an undisciplined language lending itself to lose, uncontrolled and very difficult to maintain code. Thus the quality of JAVA programming is less than one star. This why todays systems keep failing. COBOL may be old but it forces design, programming and coding standardization. No more! COBOL is one tool in computer world. I believe people still use Spanner and use it manually. Till date the product is alive. We could mange it work with all C Libraries seamlessly as other language programs.

Even the memory address also by calling a one line C function to return pointer to calling Cobol program ahead of actual C function call. Your email address will not be published.

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Robert Glass identified specific ways in which COBOL is better suited to business programming than general-purposes languages, among them: A business-oriented language needs to declare, manage, and manipulate heterogenous data. Business programs mix fixed and variable length strings, floating-point, integer, and decimal data with wild abandon in complicated record structures, often with variable parts. Database programmers are familiar with some of these issues, and object-relational mapping tools trip over these complexities regularly.

Business and financial data needs to be managed using true decimal data types. Accounting systems must be correct to the last decimal digit and need to reproduce exactly the results of hand-calculation; conventional floating-point numbers lead to complexities and errors. A business-oriented language needs to access and manipulate large amounts of record-structured data maintained externally.

Install the bitlang. Honestly, if anything is going to cause trouble, it will be this. This is all based around the days when we put our source into column Hollerith cards. In modern environments, however, these are comments. Tags: bulletin , cobol , stackoverflow.

The Stack Overflow Podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming. Women use technology, so they should create it as well. Ryan Donovan. Here's a collection of resources on how to get started using Python. From Siri to services that transcribe our every word, we explore advancements in computer systems that can understand human conversation and commands.

Ben Popper Director of Content. Charles R. Martin and Ben Popper. Still: point taken. Well, congratulations. So to all you cobol programmers: Thank you for your service! Thanks for your efforts on this. Thanks so much. BUT, 1. Email: Regina at reginalwofford gmail. I must have missed something.

I see capacity issues, not code maintenance issues. Exactly what I preach to all those smart kids every day! Thank you for the Micro Focus mention Mr. There is also a big problem in maintaining ill designed systems in OOP languages.