COBOL

Redpill me on COBOL.

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IDENTIFICATION DIVISION

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Wait, how is COBOL uswd currently,?

Modifying very old programs in very old machines in very old business that do a very specific job.

yeah, there's no real reason beyond that, Fortran has applications in supercomputing but COBOL is entirely old systems that need to be fixed up and you get to be the one programmer in a 300 mile radius that can do it.

Not that it's exceptionally hard to learn, very few people actually care to get good enough at it to stick it on their resume.

It’s used on mainframes running financial or some obscure governmental application

I'm 64 and I make more money now fixing up my old code than I ever did when I was writing it 40 years ago. I retired 9 years ago, but they just keep offering me too much money.

well you can make shitloads of money

Unsurprisingly the well-known Computerworld survey from a few years back found that 64% of respondents stated that their organization or systems used COBOL, and 48% used it significantly. More recently a survey by Micro Focus revealed the top modernization priorities, which reported;

– 85% of COBOL applications are strategic
– 65% rank knowledge transfer as the critical skills issue

This is basically why my uncle dropped of college. He wanted to learn COBOL just to make tons of money, but he had no idea just how many businesses still ran on it, and found himself signing work contracts left and right with some major institutions. After doing that for only 7 years, he retired on his 28th birthday. He still works a coding job every few years, but he's got enough money put away that he lives very comfortably in Northern California.

Is this still possible today?

bumping because I would like to know this too. I have heard more stories about younger devs trying to get into COBOL and failing because companies only want people who are already veterans with the language.

You can always become a SAP consultant if you want to work with old dumb shit

How do you even learn COBOL these days

What do you even practice it on

>very old machines
Most mainframes are leased and upgraded pretty frequently, the latest Zs feature a minimum of six 10-core 5.2 GHz chips that are pretty fucking advanced and incredibly compatible, which is the main reason COBOL programs have stuck around as long as they have. There's no real reason to upgrade them on a technical basis when you can continue to run them pretty much unmodified on the latest and most powerful single computer systems money can buy.
There's shitloads of COBOL compilers for pretty much any reasonably popular platform, including free ones like GnuCOBOL, or you can probably do with with the MVS Turnkey System if you really want some autistic oldschool solution.

Like any other programming language, you can figure it out if you actually give enough of a shit to put some effort into it.

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You can learn it at the US Naval Academy

Bumping for great interest. I hear lots of stories about huge companies paying out the nose to migrate data from cobol servers to modern infrastructure. Defense contractors and suchlike. Probably all the info we have about ayys is on a cobol server somewhere.

Finance companies rely heavily on it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

There's a finance company here that started recruiting everybody they could from local universities and trained them in COBOL.
If they completed the 6 month training program, they were basically guaranteed a job with a $100k salary with the company.

I heavily considered it, but working with COBOL is a quick way to guarantee that's all you'll be doing for the rest of your career.

Learning COBOL is the learning Mandarin of computing.
Yes, you will make good money for it. But you will not have any fun while doing so. And the second an employer learns that you have that skill, they will force you to use it.

so if i want to pick up an obscure and (probably) difficult language for fun, should i pick a lisp instead?
ive been debating if i should do fortran, cobol, or lisp next, but id rather not learn something that will become a burden to my career

LISP has a big cult following but is not really in demand.
COBOL is a soulless nightmare that you learn if you are desperate for job security.
FOTRAN is the most balanced choice of the three.

i dont intend to do this to put on a resume, just for a challenge
i'll probably look into fortran tho

FORTRAN is used heavily in scientific and mathematical computing.
The F-16 fighter jets are a mix of C/C++ and FORTRAN because at initial development, FORTRAN was the best number crunching language out there.
Weather forecasting, satellite trajectory calculations, fucking VOYAGER is all FORTRAN.

LISP used to be THE language for artificial intelligence. Read any AI textbook from before 1990 and it'll probably be in LISP.
Non-academic use is basically nonexistent.

Doing an internship this year, applied for a Mainframe Analyst role but that name only masked the Software Engineer responsibilities so now I'm stuck learning COBOL, JCL etc on z/OS. Is it really a profitable path to go down? Not that I mind learning this stuff since it feels like an IT history lesson working with all the boomers but not sure if it's "appropriate".