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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 2/18/22 10:49, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <j7844nFnlqeU1 at mid.individual.net>,
> Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2/17/22 17:15, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> True, but kids grow up dreaming about being astronauts.
>>> I don't know anyone who yearns to be a COBOL programmer.
>>
>> I still do.... :-)
> 
> Ha!  I meant to write, "I don't know any kids...", but perhaps
> I should just cite you as the exception to the rule.  :-)
> 
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> No, that's not quite accurate.  It's because the people who should
>> be teaching them COBOL refuse to for reasons with no basis in fact.
> 
> Who are those people?  University professors?  

Yes.

>                                                 What are their
> reasons and, more importantly, why aren't those reasons factual?

Because the reason usually given is that COBOL is dead and that
what little COBOL code is left is rapidly being re-written in
Java.  A statement totally unfounded.  Two recent independent
surveys of companies using COBOL pegged the number of lines of
of existing COBOL code in production running every day at about
800 billion.  And also contrary to popular belief among academics
more new code is being written every day.

> 
>>> Then there's the matter of training materials, educational
>>> venues, etc.  Universities used to teach COBOL.
>>
>> And they are the root of the problem.
> 
> This is turning into a much deeper discussion.  My opinion is
> that universities should not exist solely to provide vocational
> training.  At this point, teaching COBOL is entirely vocational.

Yes, but when one learns COBOL in University that is not the only
thing e=they learn. (Well, at least not in a decent University.
I once new a grad from RPI who bragged that he never took any
course other than his engineering and math to get his degree!)
My degree has three concentrations.  Comp Sci, Theology and
German.  And, believe it or not my Comp Sci concentration
included more Comp Sci course than a Comp Sci Major.

On a side note to your comment above.  Congratulations.  You are
carrying on an argument that has been going quite steady since at
least 1850.  With the backing of people like John Henry Newman
college education was opened up the common man and not just the
gentleman.  But the argument still rages on.  I worked for
nearly 30 years at a Jesuit University.  We went thru a "Self
Examination" where other Jesuits came in to evaluate our work
to see if we were meeting the Jesuit goals for education.  We
had one of our examiners (makes me think of the Inquest) who
came right out and said, "Computer Science is a trade and Jesuit
Schools should not be teaching it."  Interestingly enough he
was from Georgetown which is famous for turning out lawyers.
Like that's not a trade.

> 
>>>                                                  High
>>> quality textbooks were produced.
>>
>> Well, can't say I agree with that.  The textbook business is mostly
>> snake oil.  One of the most popular COBOL textbooks was written by
>> a pair of professional textbook writers, not by practitioners of the
>> art.  When I took COBOL in school I bought two additional books to
>> accompany the chosen textbook.  It contributed greatly to how well
>> I learned the subject.
> 
> Who wrote those books?  

Who wrote which?  The original was by Shelly & Cashman.  that
was 40 years ago.  They are still at it but now it's mostly
Windows Applications like MSOffice.  there used to be a Wiki
that even said they were professional textbook writers but I
can't find it at the moment.  :-)  The others I bought on my
own were references written bu current (at the time) practitioners
of the art.  I could find their names as I still have the books.

>                         At any rate, perhaps I should have said
> that there have been high quality texts on COBOL, regardless of
> whether those texts fit a prescribed textbook format.

That is true.  The Murach series are very good although they
are primarily targeted at IBM Mainframe programming.  But they
still make excellent desktop references.

> 
>>
>>>                                   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.
>>
>> There are very good books on COBOL available today.  And they
>> cover the language as is currently in use.  (That means the
>> EVALUATE verb rather than 20 level deep IF-THEN-ELSE peices.)
>> They also cover Database access from COBOL as well as the
>> old fashioned flat file stuff.  I have even considered writing
>> a COBOL text myself targeted at the use of OpenSource tools.
> 
> Go for it!  That would be a useful addition to the canon.

I may, but I have learned from experience that it is a lot
more work than most people probably think.  And in the
current atmosphere there is very little chance of actually
getting a publisher.  O'Reilly seems to be gone.

> 
>>> And who does the training?  I guess the vendors provide
>>> courses, or its OJT'ed?
>>
>> Right now probably the vendor.  GDIT, who has a very large
>> COBOL IS supporting the DOD used to advertise for interns.
>> Wanted first or second year students who had taken the
>> usual two course intro to programming and said they would
>> provide the COBOL training.
>>
>> But that is a very limited solution to the problem.  Universities
>> have abdicated their responsibility to prepare students for their
>> future careers.  I think it is time to get the Tech Schools
>> involved.  Many of them are now degree granting institutions
>> (locally you can get degrees in things like diesel mechanic!)
>> and have taught low level CIS classes already.  This could be
>> a boon for them.
> 
> I suppose there's a much larger debate to be had about the role
> of universities in professional computing.  I wouldn't say that
> they have "abdicated their responsibility to prepare students
> for their future careers", though; certainly not by abandoning
> COBOL in their curricula.

It goes much deeper than just abandoning curricula.  In most
places (at least on my side of the pond) they very vocally
attack it and put in a lot of effort steering students away
from even looking at it.

> 
> In my view, universities exist to for two things: education and
> research.  The educational mission usually means imparting the
> basics and equipping students with the tools necessary to absorb
> other information.  This naturally means learning things that
> are mostly agnostic of any particular technology; in CS, that's
> data structures and algorithms, basic coding skills, highlights
> of major topics in the field, etc.  Particular programming
> languages are not among them.

I agree up to a point.  Other than in a compiler or computer languages
course I agree one could forego actually teaching COBOL in depth.  But
then, our last course to use COBOL (and the only one to teach it) was
not really about "programming" at all.  It was called File Processing
and COBOL was by far the right language for the job.

> 
> The research side should be pushing the limits of the field ever
> outward.  If there's any interesting research to do on COBOL, I
> imagine it would be some semantic analysis, but mostly automatic
> conversion to other languages.

But you have only addressed Comp Sci.  There is another side to the
practice.  And, like most schools that teach Comp Sci we also had a
degree program called Computer Information Systems.  And the specific
target of this is the use of computers in business.  Exactly where the
teaching of COBOL as one of the primary languages would have remained.
But it didn't.  I once spoke with the IT director for a Fortune 100
Insurance company and told him one of our most distinguished and
experienced professors was telling his students that this company
was re-writing all their COBOL into Java.  He was rolling on the
floor laughing.  But that is the reality of the situation.

> 
>>>> 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.
>>
>> True.  the real question that people in the industry should be
>> asking is just why Universities refuse to meet this particular
>> need.
> 
> Probably because the need appears less pressing than reality
> might indicate, but again, universities aren't vocational
> training schools; 

Actually, they are.  Or don't you think future earnings plays a part
in deciding what to study?  Well, I guess, sadly, in some cases it
might not.  Thus the student loan fiasco.  Hard to pay back that loan
when you studied something that doesn't lead to a good paying job
(or in some cases any job!)

>                    there's a lot of COBOL out there, but again,
> how much of that is copy-pasta because people are scared of
> modifying working code?  

Copy and paste what?  Is that how you see software maintenance?
Or new development?  Admittedly, it was probably COBOL with
IT departments maintaining Source Libraries that led the way
for "code re-usability" which was supposed to be one of the
hallmarks for Ada but that hardly equates to copy & paste.

>                           Most of the COBOL work has been
> outsourced, 

Another meaningless industry buzzword.  Outsourced to who?  I mean
I mentioned GDIT handling a big DOD COBOL system.  Is that what you
call "outsourced"?  I call it government contracting.  :-)  Most of
the banks, insurance, financial and credit card companies who are
all still COBOL shops don't outsource.  They keep their IT operations
very close at hand.

>             and you can't force students to want to learn COBOL.

You don't have to force them to learn.  All you have to do is
not go out of your way to discourage it and make the material
available.  I used to sit and talk with my students in the labs.
Many of them would have been happy to learn COBOL.  Heck, I had
one who learned APL.  Not much call for that in the real world
today and certainly was no one pushing it at the University.  He
got involved through an internship with a brokerage firm who's
entire in house operations were done in APL.  And they  had no
intentions to ever re-write it.

> As a fraction of overall computing, the demand for COBOL
> programmers, at least in the United States, is small.

On what do you base this assumption?

> 
> Note that this isn't meant as an elitist/snob thing, rather just
> that the mission is different.  I suspect the soluton here is to
> provide this sort of training via vocational programs; hand in
> hand with that, societies really ought to treat those things
> with more respect.

While I think they should still be taught in colleges, I expect if
anything it will fall to the trade schools much to the eventual
dismay of the colleges.  Both sides will loose.

> 
>> It's not rocket science and most Universities that have
>> CS programs usually have CIS program as well.   Why do they
>> refuse to meet this need?
> 
> I would argue that CIS isn't strictly appropriate for a
> university, unless it's more of an inter-disciplinary research
> center, possibly offering a few survey courses.

Your idea of what a University should be is very far from the
reality of things as they have been for 2 centuries.  I would
be very interested in where you went to school.  Even the
Jesuits who are primarily and mostly interested in Liberal
Arts wouldn't share your opinion. (Well, most of them anyway!)

bill