Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 24th May 2007 20:59 UTC
"Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon's TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it's very difficult to declare these skills -- or any computer skill, really -- dead." My Take: "C" dying should have been "x86 Assembly".
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Member since:
2006-01-12
I'd have to agree completely with your statement. I don't code in COBOL, but I completed a study about a week ago on COBOL use in the DoD, which heavily tied into private business use as well. COBOL is still prevalent on the backend, a large percentage of business apps (58% according to a Computerworld survey) are still written in COBOL. I was surprised at this last, but it makes sense with the installed base and it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I'm really surprised Computerworld released this considering they also have 2 other recent articles stating how deep COBOL use is in most organizations.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleB...
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleB...
COBOL was MADE for business. It incorporates accumulated business rules and processes, something which a lot of programmers just don't get and why migrations to a more modern language usually fail. When it comes to transactional processing, there is still no match for COBOL. A very small percentage of organizations have successfully migrated mission-critical apps from COBOL to a more modern language. Most major upgrades have failed and organizations have resorted to modernizing the codebase using COBOL 2002 and web-based frontends.
As the first article says, "we will run out of COBOL programmers before we run out of COBOL programs." I have been seriously considering adding COBOL to my skillset - specifically specializing in training myself to migrate apps away from COBOL. A lot of orgs want to do it, but they lack the know-how.