[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/14/2018 9:09 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 12/13/18 10:56 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 12/13/2018 10:04 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> On 12/13/18 8:42 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>> On 12/13/2018 5:40 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>>> On 12/13/18 4:17 PM, Milton Baar wrote:
>>>>>> Or perhaps just granting an educational or discounted license...there
>>>>>> is plenty of inexpensive hardware around...and I don't think an
>>>>>> endowment would be either needed or likely.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This could be a way for OpenVMS to be back in the educational sector
>>>>>> with the possibly positive flow-on effects.  I don't think that the
>>>>>> IBM arrangement is an act of charity on their behalf, they understand
>>>>>> the benefits as DEC once did.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> HP had a costless education license. It did not help keep VMS
>>>>> around Universities it was already at and certainly didn't
>>>>> bring it into new locations.  Trust me, I know.  I fought
>>>>> that battle until finally being told the equipment had to be
>>>>> removed.
>>>>
>>>> You're never going to win them all ....
>>>>
>>>> When you get someone in charge that wants to go a particular 
>>>> direction, it's gonna happen.  Not much you can do, nor is it worth 
>>>> wasting your time.
>>>>
>>>> But that doesn't mean the entire planet is going to go in that 
>>>> direction.  Nothing is that universal.
>>>
>>> Academia is.  That's why even with COBOL being a strong contender
>>> in the business, banking, insurance, credit card, and government
>>> world no one in academia offers courses that utilize COBOL and
>>> the continue to advise students to  not even learn the language.
>>> And then we have OOP.  Once academia grasped this anchor everyone
>>> jumped on the bandwagon.
>>
>> Universities teach a variety of different languages.
>>
>> Java, C, C++, C#, Haskell, OCAML, Python etc. are frequently seen.
>>
>> Yes - languages like Cobol, Fortran, Pascal and Ada are rarely taught
>> today.
> 
> No decent program "teaches" programming languages.  They teach
> concepts and use languages best suited for those concepts.

Doesn't change the fact.

>> But that should not be a surprise. At least Cobol and Fortran are
>> not very well suited to demonstrate any programming paradigm (PP,
>> OOP, GP, FP). None of them are particular in demand on the job
>> market.
> 
> Fortran is still in use at places like NASA, probablt ESA and other
> scientific and engineering locations.  Boeing, Lockheed-Martin,
> Airbus.
> 
> COBOL is is used by some of the largest IT systems in the world.
> United States IRS for all income taxes.  DFAS, for payroll for
> all DOD military and civilian employees.  DOD Medical System for
> every military Hospital, clinic, Dental Clinic.  The majority of
> Credit Card processing.  Most of the major insurance providers
> like AFLAC (yes, the duck uses COBOL).
> 
> Sounds like you are yet another who has drank the academic
> Kool Aid.

Just someone that are able to do basic research.

There are some Fortran code and a lot of Cobol code
in production.

But the companies are not hiring people to maintain
or enhance it.

Most likely because they have the people to maintain
the old code and new stuff is done in other languages.

In general. Of course there can be exceptions.

But what skills are in demand is an observable fact.

Jobs on dice.com today:

Java        29992
JavaScript  23650
C++         17626
Python       9476
C#           6279
C            4881
Go           3890
Perl         2439
Ruby         2051
PHP          1635
Scala        1420
TypeScript    754
VB.NET        651
Groovy        490
Cobol         373
Ada           272
Kotlin        215
Fortran       122
Clojure        65
Rust           54
Delphi         36
Haskell        32
OCAML           8
Pascal          4
PL/I            3

You will get a bit different results with a different job search
engine a different day.

But they will all show the same neither Cobol nor Fortran skills
are not in demand.

Arne