Anyone still program with cobol for work?

[havocsquad 0]

Most people talk about C++, VB, or Java usually, I was just  wondering if there is anyone in the OFP community who still uses COBOL anymore for work or work-related projects?

[Apollo 0]

I know some Belgium ministery's where they still use Cobol for their databases. (for their fleet of 80286 computers )

And i regulary have seen work applications that featured Cobol ,however their are few people that actually wan't to learn that languaghe ,most people that know Cobol are of the old garde of informatics ,civil engineers of age around 40-50 mostly.

Reason? Cobol is quite hard and cumbersome ,and essentally it's an almost obsolete languuaghe.

[theavonlady 2]

I don't but we have customers that do.

Cobol hard and cumbersome? It's the greatest language around unless you're lousy in English.

You can write programs to read like a book. Do it correctly and you can show COBOL programs to people who don't know the first thing about programming and they'll understand the logic and the sequence.

Obsolete? Did You Know:

By many Y2K dooms day believers, COBOL was going to be terminated after the year 2000. And few of those believers are still teaching COBOL at local community colleges to this day.

75% of the world's business data is in COBOL.

There are between 180 billion and 200 billion lines of COBOL code in use worldwide.

15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) through 2005 will be in COBOL.

CICS transaction volume (such as COBOL-based ATM transactions) grew from 20 billion per day in 1998 to 30 billion per day in 2002.

Replacement costs for COBOL systems, estimated at $25 per line, are in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

There are 90,000 COBOL programmers in North America in 2002. Over the next four years there will be a 13% decrease in their number due to retirement and death.

There are at least 10,000 "Free Agent" COBOL programmers in the US today.

The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL programmers.

Any programmer with above average skills in COBOL can quickly learn the basics of Web Enabling, at home, through self-training.

COBOL programmers could be the key to new IT. The legions of COBOL programmers who helped organizations get legacy applications ready for Y2K could find new work bringing those applications into the Internet age.

Source: TechiWarehouse.com

[Ex-RoNiN 0]

*Throws C, Perl and Java books out of the window and goes to Museum to look for Cobol books*

[theavonlady 2]

*Throws C, Perl and Java books out of the window and goes to Museum to look for Cobol books*

Just go to Amazon.com and search BOOKS for "cobol".

[Apollo 0]

Lol we wanna have a debate on this?

Wikipedia says:

Quote[/b] ]COBOL as defined in the original specification, possessed excellent self-documenting capabilities, good file handling methods, and exceptionally good data typing for the time, owing to its use of the PICTURE clause for detailed field specification. However by modern standards for programming language definition, it had serious flaws, notably verbose syntax and lack of support for local variables, recursion, dynamic memory allocation, and structured programming. Its lack of support for object-oriented programming is understandable, given that the concept was unknown at the time

COBOL has many reserved words, and it is hard to avoid unintentionally using one, without using some convention such as adding an unlikely prefix to all variable names. The original COBOL specification even supported self-modifying code via the famous "ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y" statement. Consequently, little new code is being written in COBOL. However, the COBOL specification has been redefined over the years to address some of these criticisms. and later definitions of COBOL have remedied many of these lacks, adding improved control structures, object-orientation and removing the ability to use self-modifying code.

Many COBOL programs are still in use in major commercial enterprises, notably financial institutions. Some people think that the use of serial decimal arithmetic in its design happened to make programs designed without provision for the advent of the 2000s particularly vulnerable to failure with the year 2000 problem; however, it is difficult to see why they should have formed this opinion. It should be pointed out that COBOL's serial decimal arithmetic avoided many other problems that can occur with the naive use of floating point for financial calculations. Hence, many elderly COBOL programmers enjoyed several years of highly-paid work, often to fix the problems in systems they designed

I retain the oppinion that this is a cumbersome and somewhat obsolete languaghe ,although it still has some good use in certain fields.But it lacks many important feature's that some modern languaghe's have.

[Grizzlie 0]

Modern programming languages r like swiss knives - u can do everything with it (i know- i have Officer's Camp ;) ), but if u want to do something faster and better, u would take specialised tool - like COBOL.

I still remember my experiences with DOS based Clipper for DBase - for indexing, filtering and searching database with about 10,000 records PC XT 4.7 MHz with 640 KB RAM was good enough (who today remembers such configurations... )

In US they says - Don't throw Confederation's money ;)

[theavonlady 2]

I still remember my experiences with DOS based Clipper for DBase - for indexing, filtering and searching database with about 10,000 records PC XT 4.7 MHz with 640 KB RAM was good enough (who today remembers such configurations... )

I remember Clipper and Dbase. Ugh!

Our first PC was an IBM PS/2 model 25.

[havocsquad 0]

Nice summary of COBOL and it's widespread use, very accurate assessment Avon, it's everywhere.  COBOL here at this university is highly stressed and we have an instructor here highly regarded and appreciative by many top U.S. companies with large information systems that use COBOL.

Many companies are constantly inviting my COBOL instructor to conferences, discussions, and he has top notch relationships with job recruiters for top information system companies.

If you finish COBOL 1 and COBOL 2 here with in his class with a grade of B or higher, and get a good letter of recommendation from him, you can easily get hired by just about ANYWHERE that uses COBOL if they have a spot open.  

If he says your good for the job and highly recommends you for this specific job, that's about a 30 to 40% advantage for you in the resume reviewing and interview process versus other applicants, literally it is.  His word carries a lot of weight in the IS community.

The college students here that go on to graduate and finish COBOL 2 with a good grade tend to be trainers for most of the applicants for entry-level COBOL programmers.

Relating to the "confusing" or "cubersome" issue, the main reason people find it so annoying to program is the lack of glitter and neat windows interfaces. (Translation:  LAZY PROGRAMMERS)   Using the mental thinking of a typical VB or C++ programmer does not work with COBOL.  COBOL is a English driven programming language which requires disicipline and planning, you can't just try to whip up a program on the fly and expect it to run without a ton of errors and problems.

You have to plan what the program will do, what the input file will exactly contain and how you structure the input file.  Then you have to make spreadsheets to show the look and the results of what the program will do like a Loan Payment program or such.

Once you finish the spreadsheets, then you must do a printerspacing chart.  This shows what the output text file will look when the title, heading, detail, footing, and total lines are written to file.

You also must plan out the user interface for the program by using a printerspacing chart.

The printer spacing chart must be finished so the variables for the lines of output can be declared.

Then you must plan how the program will process the records and then create a prestructure chart or "pseudocode" that explains what the program will do for the procedure division.

After you finish with ALL these steps, then you can start coding a COBOL program.

Debugging might look extremely difficult at first, but once you understand the error messages meaning and how they are caused, debugging 133 errors for a small to medium sized program isn't too difficult.

Lastly, many math and computing functions in COBOL are in english words, not complicated or elaborate statements.  That makes COBOL easier for someone not experienced with programming to understand the program.

For example, here is a line of COBOL code multiplying a value:

MULTIPLY AMT-A BY AMT-B GIVING AMT-C

That means AMT-A * AMT-B = AMT-C

Here is a really good example of the best part of COBOL:

ADD 1 TO RECORD-CTR

That means 1 is added to record counter without having to write RECORD-CTR = RECORD-CTR + 1  OR  += RECORD-CTR

Anyways, glad to see some good feedback on this.

Later,

Havoc.

[sander 14]

Hi,

There is still plenty of COBOL around in various applications, not all of them legacy systems. I used to work for a couple of years in COBOL application development. In my opinion COBOL is a much more accessible language than many more modern ones and easier to get into for people lacking a beta background.

Regards,

Sander