[COFF] COBOL.

Wesley Parish wobblygong at gmail.com
Tue Apr 14 18:18:39 AEST 2020


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 <crossd at gmail.com> 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.)
>


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