Anyone Speak COBOL?

[C_Clayton_Jones]

“Some states have found themselves in need of people who know a 60-year old programming language called COBOL to retrofit the antiquated government systems now struggling to process the deluge of unemployment claims brought by the coronavirus crisis.”

COBOL, a 60-year-old computer language, is in the COVID-19 spotlight

As state governments seek to fix overwhelmed unemployment benefit systems, they need programmers skilled in a language that was passé by the early 1980s.

www.fastcompany.com

I have research access to a government system that is based on COBOL.

It runs in a Windows-based terminal emulator – no GUI, keyboard only; type in commands at the command prompt and hit enter.

The problem, of course, is that there are few programmers around who speak this almost dead computer language.

 

[Slyhunter]

I speak it.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

It's one of the languages that I learned in college,back in the early 1980s. That was, of course, almost forty years ago,and it's been about seventeen years or so since I've done any programming in a professional capacity.

 

[MarathonMike]

I spent my early career programming on the command line in several languages. COBOL was one of them, it's easy. But the problem is when you are maintaining someone else's COBOL program unless they were very disciplined coders, their programs were really hard to follow, debug or modify.

 

[Wyatt earp]

Only 1980s computer programming I remember is Dbase

But this is 1960 when everything was done on punch cards, Ones and zeros

 

[toobfreak]

“Some states have found themselves in need of people who know a 60-year old programming language called COBOL to retrofit the antiquated government systems now struggling to process the deluge of unemployment claims brought by the coronavirus crisis.”

COBOL, a 60-year-old computer language, is in the COVID-19 spotlight

As state governments seek to fix overwhelmed unemployment benefit systems, they need programmers skilled in a language that was passé by the early 1980s.

www.fastcompany.com

I have research access to a government system that is based on COBOL.

It runs in a Windows-based terminal emulator – no GUI, keyboard only; type in commands at the command prompt and hit enter.

The problem, of course, is that there are few programmers around who speak this almost dead computer language.

That's pretty funny. When I worked for the Fed, our systems had some key, CRITICAL programs that still ran DOS. As I recall, as the story went, many years earlier they tried to update the system to a more modern operating language and I forget what the projected cost was but Congress decided to pass on allocating the money for it. So when I was there, they had a few emulator programs that attempted to interface between the two talking to the old program saving you from DOS as much as possible while trying to present it to you in some "reasonable" GUI and it crashed all the time.

So the next time you wonder why government is so slow or inefficient or pathetic and they cannot deal with anything, try to remember it isn't the poor slob you have on the telephone, it is the fact that this is where the "finest and the best" of the US federal government is.

 

[MarathonMike]

“Some states have found themselves in need of people who know a 60-year old programming language called COBOL to retrofit the antiquated government systems now struggling to process the deluge of unemployment claims brought by the coronavirus crisis.”

COBOL, a 60-year-old computer language, is in the COVID-19 spotlight

As state governments seek to fix overwhelmed unemployment benefit systems, they need programmers skilled in a language that was passé by the early 1980s.

www.fastcompany.com

I have research access to a government system that is based on COBOL.

It runs in a Windows-based terminal emulator – no GUI, keyboard only; type in commands at the command prompt and hit enter.

The problem, of course, is that there are few programmers around who speak this almost dead computer language.

That's pretty funny. When I worked for the Fed, our systems had some key, CRITICAL programs that still ran DOS. As I recall, as the story went, many years earlier they tried to update the system to a more modern operating language and I forget what the projected cost was but Congress decided to pass on allocating the money for it. So when I was there, they had a few emulator programs that attempted to interface between the two talking to the old program saving you from DOS as much as possible while trying to present it to you in some "reasonable" GUI and it crashed all the time.

So the next time you wonder why government is so slow or inefficient or pathetic and they cannot deal with anything, try to remember it isn't the poor slob you have on the telephone, it is the fact that this is where the "finest and the best" of the US federal government is.

LOL How many times did I hear "we don't have the time or budget to do it right, just get it working".

 

[Auld Phart]

Thread Cleaned

Stay on topic

 

[Muhammed]

I learned COBOL when I was a teenager back in the early 1980s.

I haven't used COBOL since I had a business fixing the Y2k bug.

 

[Muhammed]

I spent my early career programming on the command line in several languages. COBOL was one of them, it's easy. But the problem is when you are maintaining someone else's COBOL program unless they were very disciplined coders, their programs were really hard to follow, debug or modify.

Yeah, back then everybody just kinda did things their own way.

 

[my2¢]

I spent the first 10 years of my professional life programming in Cobol. I can even recall it being Grace Hopper that developed it and is credited for coming up with the term "bug" for a computer glitch.

The terms "bug" and "debugging" are popularly attributed to Admiral Grace Hopper in the 1940s. While she was working on a Mark II computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. ( Debugging - Wikipedia )

 

[rightwinger]

I remember when the government insisted that everything be programmed in Ada

 

[my2¢]

This thread sure is bringing back the memories: Cobol, JCL, moving from punch cards to Panvalet, Easytrieve, core dumps, CICS. My first job out of college was at Nationwide Insurance home office in downtown Columbus back in '76 with an annual salary of $10,700. After a year-and-half and a raise or two, my boss told me I was being paid too much for programming and I would be advanced to an analyst. Wanting to do both and being uncomfortable with the culture (had to wear a suit coat whenever outside of the department) in '78 I moved on to a smaller Columbus outfit called Industrial Nucleonics / AccuRay for a whopping $16,000.

 

[Fang]

Wow. Hard to believe any systems still run on COBOL. I guess these government programmers still transfer data using floppy disks?

 

[DigitalDrifter]

Yep, you started out with 'Basic' and then graduated to Cobol. It truly sucked.

 

[MarathonMike]

I remember when the government insisted that everything be programmed in Ada

Hey you know I did quite a lot of ADA in the 90s and I thought it was an excellent language. I was a software team lead with 10 engineers and we were able to integrate very quickly and smoothly. But when C++ and Object Oriented languages became all the rage, poor ADA83 was kicked to the curb. By the time ADA95 came out with OO capabilites the train had left the station.

 

[MarathonMike]

Wow. Hard to believe any systems still run on COBOL. I guess these government programmers still transfer data using floppy disks?

LOL can't you just imagine those old main frames with smoke coming out of them when they all of a sudden had to process 100 times the number of claims they were "designed" for?

 

[MarathonMike]

These COBOL jobs look like they are paying around $80K a year. That is chump change for programmers with a unique skill.

 

[Dick Foster]

“Some states have found themselves in need of people who know a 60-year old programming language called COBOL to retrofit the antiquated government systems now struggling to process the deluge of unemployment claims brought by the coronavirus crisis.”

COBOL, a 60-year-old computer language, is in the COVID-19 spotlight

As state governments seek to fix overwhelmed unemployment benefit systems, they need programmers skilled in a language that was passé by the early 1980s.

www.fastcompany.com

I have research access to a government system that is based on COBOL.

It runs in a Windows-based terminal emulator – no GUI, keyboard only; type in commands at the command prompt and hit enter.

The problem, of course, is that there are few programmers around who speak this almost dead computer language.

That's a blast from the past. How about FORTRAN? Its still faster than C.
There are other old programming languages that are way more obscure than COBOL. COBOL was so very popular on all the old business mainframe machines. I think C and its variants largely replaced both COBOL and FORTRAN in the majority of cases. BASIC made a big dent on the bottom end where it evolved.

Who here can remember core memory, paper tape and 8" floppy discs?

 

[Muhammed]

“Some states have found themselves in need of people who know a 60-year old programming language called COBOL to retrofit the antiquated government systems now struggling to process the deluge of unemployment claims brought by the coronavirus crisis.”

COBOL, a 60-year-old computer language, is in the COVID-19 spotlight

As state governments seek to fix overwhelmed unemployment benefit systems, they need programmers skilled in a language that was passé by the early 1980s.

www.fastcompany.com

I have research access to a government system that is based on COBOL.

It runs in a Windows-based terminal emulator – no GUI, keyboard only; type in commands at the command prompt and hit enter.

The problem, of course, is that there are few programmers around who speak this almost dead computer language.

That's a blast from the past. How about FORTRAN? Its still faster than C.
There are other old programming languages that are way more obscure than COBOL. COBOL was so very popular on all the old business mainframe machines. I think C and its variants largely replaced both COBOL and FORTRAN in the majority of cases. BASIC made a big dent on the bottom end where it evolved.

Who here can remember core memory, paper tape and 8" floppy discs?

My first computer was a TRS-80 like this.

Hell, it cost me hundreds of dollars just to get an expansion module to upgrade it from 4k RAM to 16k RAM. I stored my stuff on cassette tapes.

A floppy disc drive was a pipe dream for an 11 year old kid that would have cost me hundreds of dollars more.

But I did learn computer programming. BASIC and BASIC II.

When I got to high school they had a computer course that taught BASIC II. I already knew that so I just took the course for an easy A.

But the teacher was really cute with deeply pretty blue eyes and therefore very persuasive and convinced me and one other student to learn COBOL in another classroom on a different system for extra credit.