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

[Dan Cross]

In article <sumfka$spd$1 at dont-email.me>,
Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>On 2/17/2022 3:28 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
>Where do astronauts come from?
>
>WE TRAIN THEM FOR THE JOB!

True, but kids grow up dreaming about being astronauts.
I don't know anyone who yearns to be a COBOL programmer.

The issue isn't that you can't train people to do it; it's
that almost no one _wants_ to be trained to do it.

Then there's the matter of training materials, educational
venues, etc.  Universities used to teach COBOL.  High
quality textbooks were produced.  These days, not so much.
Most training materials will be second hand books describing
old version of the language, or vendor-supplied materials
of varying levels of quality and erudition.

And who does the training?  I guess the vendors provide
courses, or its OJT'ed?

>And that is true for just about anything on the planet.  Yes, we train for 
>required jobs.  But the Cobol (and Basic,Fortran, (hock, spit, gag) C, and 
>others will define the needs, based upon the entities with those needs.

Well, good luck finding them.

>I have my doubts about the training defining the needs.

It's not a, "mommy, where do COBOL programmers come from?"
question.

	- Dan C.