[HN Gopher] COBOL Programming Course
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COBOL Programming Course
Author : marcodiego
Score : 65 points
Date : 2022-05-01 18:07 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| BasiliusCarver wrote:
| I had fun a few years ago learning a little bit of COBOL and wish
| this had been around then because you never know if any of the
| documentation is relevant to modern-ish COBOL. Feel free to
| repurpose this version of tic tac toe for learning
| https://github.com/ShaunLawrie/TicTacTOBOL
| t_mann wrote:
| Does anyone have confirmation for the old rumour that there is
| high demand for COBOL engineers because of legacy systems eg in
| banks? And how does one go about finding these opportunities? I
| remember once talking to a freelance engineer, he didn't do COBOL
| but something similar in the sense that a lot of banks had legacy
| systems with that technology and that people had been saying
| since the 80's that it'd soon be extinct. He mentioned a (paid)
| database service which he used to source his clients, he was
| based in Germany, as were most of his clients. Anyone have an
| idea what that could be?
|
| I'd totally be down for learning an obscure language and deep-
| diving into sensitive systems that have been providing value for
| a long time already. But basic economic logic tells me that there
| won't be a free lunch there, I mean people pick up new
| programming languages all the time.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| India was sanctioned in the 90's bythe US (supposedly for being
| communist leaning) so they couldnt get PC's which meant all
| they could learn on was mainframes.
|
| In the late 80's early 90's Cobol programmers were being laid
| off by big companies, as it was all going PC, the COBOL
| millennium bug stuff was outsourced to Indians because those
| companies who laid off their staff couldnt get them back.
|
| Its mainly a rumour for the UK and possibly other Western
| countries.
|
| Tesco bank, TSB all use PC's, the TSB banking system was a
| rehashed share trading platform which is why they had problems
| a few years back, seems no one likes old school db
| transactions.
|
| Tesco is full on in MS's pocket as is most of the NHS systems,
| and these are all online, when you do your online Tesco shop
| you connect to the store that will do the delivery because
| every store has a different product range and no mainframe or
| server could handle that for the whole country. You your GP
| surgery systems, regional health trusts, are all online which
| then gives you an idea of who is behind Wannacry considering
| the level of spooky surveillance of telecoms here in the UK.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| Yes, it's true. My dad works for a large credit card processor
| that runs a ton of COBOL and they have a really hard time
| finding people.
|
| The big problem those guys are running into is that they aren't
| paying anywhere close to market rates for engineers working in
| more modern stacks. Senior developer pay tops out around $120k
| last I checked and they've been reliant on cheap offshore
| contractors for years now to insulate themselves from paying
| modern dev wages in the US.
|
| Funny thing though, the contracting firms are now notifying
| these companies that they won't be supplying COBOL developers
| into the future because there's a lot more money to be made
| contracting out devs in modern stacks than COBOL. It doesn't
| get a ton of attention because nobody can see the future, but
| hearing my dad talk about his company makes me slightly
| concerned about the future of our digital payments
| infrastructure.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Yeah its kinda scary. People meme it but so much of the
| modern world relies on an aging stock of retiree's to come in
| on contract and do a thing then leave to be sustainable.
|
| It's not the amount of stuff that runs COBOL thats a problem,
| it's how critical that infrastructure is to human society - I
| don't think that's an overstatement.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > it's how critical that infrastructure is to human society
|
| Exactly, and the regression horror stories I hear are
| unbelievable because these codebases are so old.
|
| A while back, a major customer of this processor
| transmitted a payment reconciliation file that had bad
| headers in it and brought down the entire reconciliation
| system (billions of dollars a day flow through this
| platform). No basic input validation, no escape hatch for
| corrupted files, nothing. I couldn't believe it when I
| heard the story. The crazy part was how long it would take
| to harden the system against bad input like that because a
| lot of that code was written 20-30 years ago.
|
| People working in modern systems think they know tech
| debt...
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Anecdotal of course but I had a taxi driver the other day
| (small town in north UK) who mentioned, after asking me what I
| do, that he gets about 1 job a year (from a contact that has
| reached out because the place can't get anyone else) on COBOL
| from banks / FS who just need a little thing adding or some bug
| fixing. He said he basically gets a big holiday every year and
| some money to put away from it. Hasn't touched any other IT job
| since early 2000s.
|
| I know its a meme at this point but there is definitely some
| sort of demand, I think the problem is that, while the stock of
| people is diminishing, they want battle hardened experts to
| come in for a few grand a day and do a thing and leave. Not a
| young developer wanting salary with a big backlog of work.
| vmsp wrote:
| This project made the rounds a couple of years (months?) ago.
| Always accompanied by mentions of companies having a hard time
| hiring engineers to work on COBOL codebases. I've never had the
| luck of stumbling on one of these. Maybe because I'm not based in
| the US or just didn't look hard enough. It'd certainly be cool to
| take a peek at that code.
| the_af wrote:
| Nah, your intuition is right: there are not that many jobs for
| COBOL (not outside boring legacy maintenance jobs for banking
| systems).
|
| Unlike what recurring posts on HN would have you believe, it's
| also not the way to a high paying job, either.
| christophilus wrote:
| I worked with a guy who had the systems manual for a US nuclear
| missile facility. (I have no idea how he got his hands on it.)
| It had a bunch of COBOL in it.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| About 20+ years ago a friend of mine and I had just started a
| company in Denmark, and we got a call from a bank that wanted
| to know if we had any experts in 'protocol' design, and if we
| had anyone that knew COBOL. These were not our specialties but
| at least have had one contact.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Banks, insurance companies, in-house IT at large corps and
| govs is where you will still find COBOL.
|
| By the way if you are already a reasonably good programmer
| you can pick up COBOL in a few weeks. It's a very
| straightforward language. Getting familiar with how things
| are done on a mainframe will take longer.
| the_af wrote:
| Agreed on everything you say, except I still find it
| curious why these seasonal "let's learn COBOL" posts find a
| place here on HN.
|
| I mean, yes, there's a challenge in navigating boring
| legacy COBOL banking systems, which follow no conventions,
| were created before code versioning was a thing, or best
| practices for that matter. Yes, it's challenging and
| therefore of interest to hackers, but still...
|
| ... striking my fingers with a hammer is similarly
| interesting and challenging, but why would I want to do it?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I would not be so sure on the "follow no conventions,
| created before code versioning was a thing"
|
| COBOL shops in my (admittedly limited experience in the
| early 1990s) had conventions, standard skeleton code for
| various things (referred to as copybooks) and source code
| control of a sort (very centralized of course, since
| everything was centralized). They definitely had
| separated "regions" for dev, test, and production where I
| worked, and a process for moving code changes to
| production. In my experience (as a staff consultant with
| a major firm), if they had consultants building systems,
| they certainly had a defined methodology, as consulting
| firms love that.
|
| I'll grant that there may have been a wide range of
| variance on this sort of thing. Just as there is today in
| many shops.
|
| I'm also not trying to sell anyone on the idea. Going
| back to COBOL would be about the last thing I'd want to
| do personally, even if there were good money in it.
| the_af wrote:
| Interesting. That wasn't my experience working at a bank,
| or my dad's, but it was the same bank ;)
| joshocar wrote:
| My friend is a manager at a big insurance company. They
| have a bunch of legacy stuff in COBOL.
| owyn wrote:
| It's Sunday, my dad was a COBOL programmer, sure I'll spend 15
| minutes checking it out. The main site link on GitHub is a 404
| though [0]. The "getting started" link in the README points to a
| release notes page and do you have to scroll down to find a PDF
| [1]. That said, the intro does start with VSCode and a plugin
| which provides language server support for COBOL (and PL/1!) and
| a CLI tool (Zowe [2]) for interaction with a Z/OS mainframe. This
| does seem like a pretty modern and up to date intro. Cool.
|
| I do think this could benefit from someone making a nice "modern
| language" landing page for it. I remember an April fools joke
| from 20 years ago promoting COBOL as the hot new web language,
| maybe it's finally time :)
|
| [0] https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-
| co...
|
| [1] https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-
| co...
|
| [2] https://docs.zowe.org/stable/web_help/index.html
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I remember an April fools joke from 20 years ago promoting
| COBOL as the hot new web language, maybe it's finally time
|
| Cobol on Wheelchair https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair
|
| Cobol on Cogs http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I interviewed as a COBOL programmmer.
|
| The place had given up hiring actual COBOL programmers, and
| instead hired pure computer science folks and Java programmers.
|
| That combo seemed to work fine.
| xigoi wrote:
| Interesting. I'd expect Java programmers to be the least likely
| to be willing to learn a different language:
| the_af wrote:
| Why?
|
| Java is a starting point for many programmers, especially
| because there was a time were every "coding school" was a
| Java shop. But programmers naturally migrate from that to
| other waters: some to Scala or Kotlin, others shift gears and
| go to Python, others choose Golang.
|
| Java has a special affinity to COBOL, if only because Java
| is/was widespread in "enterprise" systems. A common joke was
| that Java was the successor of COBOL!
| rahen wrote:
| Java and COBOL share some common principles. The languages
| aren't the point, the platform are. They both run on high
| performance / reliable virtual machines, allowing a superior
| scalability, reliability and long term compatibility to what
| could be achieved with more coupled approaches.
|
| Likewise, running COBOL tied to an x86 instance could be
| feasible but would be missing the point entirely.
|
| You could more or less consider a JEE application server as a
| software implementation of a mainframe. Java AS (Websphere,
| Weblogic, JBoss...) are essentially what killed the mainframe
| and midrange (IBM i / AS/400) in the enterprise. So yeah,
| Java/JEE, COBOL, RPG: different languages, same goals under
| the hood.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The mainframe and midrange computers are _vastly_ different
| platforms. Common server systems are a good replacement for
| the latter, not so much the former.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| There was a local culture of assuming Java programmers could
| learn any language.
|
| Lots of positions would say "seeking Java programmers" but
| not involve actual Java.
|
| I think this was because there was a surplus of Java people.
| ultimape wrote:
| LEARNING COBOL IS VERY GOOD IF YOU WANNA INFILTRATE AND HACK
| LEGACY SYSTEMS.
| the_af wrote:
| I think you meant: IDENTIFICATION SECTION.
| AUTHOR ULTIMAPE. PROGRAM DIVISION. CODE STARTS
| ANY MINUTE NOW. YEAH, REALLY. LEARN COBOL
| GIVING HACKING RESULTING IN INFILTRATION. CODE ENDS
| HERE. REALLY. THE END.
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