[Info-vax] And another one bites the dust....

[Dan Cross]

In article <j77mkgFl71aU1 at mid.individual.net>,
Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>You mean all those people running zSystems with COBOL, DB2 and CICS
>that actually make up the largest majority of the money makers in the
>world?  The ones who have been told for at least 4 decades that the
>mainframe is dead.  Oh yeah, and so is COBOL.  But then, didn't Byte
>predict the death of Unix back in September 1992.  :-)

Oh boy.  COBOL is being discussed; better put on my
asbestos undies.

But everything you said is true: there's a ton of COBOL,
DB2, CICS, etc, out there, much that runs on mainframes.
Something like 80% of the world's credit transactions
hit some COBOL somewhere at some point.

But two things to consider: COBOL on IBM mainframes has
gone from being, in some sense, the median programmer
experience to being a tiny fraction of that experience.
While there may be more mainframes than ever, there's
more compute than ever in total, and as a percentage of
that total, the mainframe asymptotically crawls to zero.
We're never going to see, "Mainframe dead! News at 11!"
in our lifetimes, but so what?

Nevermind considerations of COBOL as a language; those
aren't terribly relevant.   What IS relevant are COBOL
programmers, and the number of them again shrinks as a
percentage of the total.  Now, in some ways that means
that the remaining COBOL hounds can command their own
paychecks, and that's great for them, but I seriously
want to know: of the N millions of lines of COBOL code
created annually, how many of those are copy-pasted
sequences for existing programs, slightly modified
with new behavior, because without semantically aware
editing tools it's very difficult to understand what
procedures are called from where (lookin' at you, 'THRU'
modifiers on 'PERFORM' statments), especially in large
codebases?

Those systems are there because they work and because
it is economically prohibitive to move off of them.
But I see the changing landscape, particularly the lack
of new COBOL programmers being produced as time goes
on, as a serious risk.

	- Dan C.