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

[Dan Cross]

In article <j7a9d8F5tfpU1 at mid.individual.net>,
Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>On 2/18/22 10:49, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> 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.

Well, that's an opinion.

>>                                                 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.

I don't know any academics who think that COBOL is dead.  But
I also don't know any academics who think about COBOL much at
all.

Everyone who's paying any attention knows there's oodles of
COBOL out there, much of which is quite important.

>>>> 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.

But that begs the question: why should _COBOL_ be part of
the cirriculum?

>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.

Incorrect; that's an argument over _who_ should be elligible
for higher education, which I made no statement about.  What
we're discussing here is _what_ should be taught in a college
education.  You evidently feel that COBOL should be taught.
I can't see much of an argument for that.  There's a lot of
COBOL out there, sure; so what?  There's a lot of Visual Basic,
and a lot of JavaScript.  Probably more HTML is generated on
a daily basis than all COBOL in the world combined.  Should
HTML feature in a college education?  How about CSS?  Etc.
Should universities teach carpentry, plumbing or iron work?
These are all important things; what is the domain of a
university and what is not?

I'd rather that a university education teach fundamentals;
specific skills can be learned in industry.

>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.

I'm sure I must have heard something about knife fights
with Jesuits somehwere along the way.

>>> 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.

It's funny, but I've used "textbooks" written by practitioners.
But at this level, we're arguing semantics about what it means
to be a textbook, which is not useful.  The point was whether
high quality texts exist suitable for use in a university (or
other) course.

>>                         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.

Good to go, then.  We're in that venerable state of "violent
agreement" on this point.

>>>>                                   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.

I don't know; if there's a market, then someone will publish.
O'Reilly does indeed seem to be out to lunch, but the Rust book
was amazingly good.  Like, early-90s O'Reilly quality.

>> 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.

I know a lot of academics and I don't think I've ever heard them
discuss COBOL, either for or against.  I don't think there's some
cabal of Univeristy professors conspiring to keep COBOL down.

>> 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.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to mention in a survey course on
programming language design; there's a lot of useful history there.
For an undergraduate course on compilers, I'd tend towards something
that was easy to parse and had reasonable semantics, so as not to
muddy the topic with too much detail about particular languages.

>> 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.

I have no real experience with CIS; sorry.  If there are
professors there poo-pooing COBOL, well, I guess they probably
shouldn't.  For that matter, I'm not a computer scientist; I
was trained as a mathematician.

It does strike me that perhaps, in this case, the IT director
should spend less time on the floor and more time talking with
the professor, and the professor should come out of the ivory
tower every now and again.  But most of the faculty I interact
with these days have fingers in industry and know the score
for real; but I'm not a business person.

>> 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?

I'll ask you to please not put words in my mouth, thank you.
I try hard not to do that to others, and hope they'll reciprocate.

>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!)

Again, my view is that a university education should teach
techniques, not specific technologies.  The technologies can
probably be picked up on the job as needed.  If a competent
computer science graduate can't absorb COBOL in a few months,
then their education has failed them.

>>                    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?

Again, please don't put words in my mouth.  I don't do that
to you (I hope) and request the same courtesy in return.

>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.

What I mean specifically is the danger of "PERFORM ... THRU ..."
style statements.  In a large code base, this makes it very
difficult to determine what is invoked from where; in that
sort of environment (and I fully acknowledge that I'm
speculating here) it may be safer to simply copy a section
of code, and modify the copy to fit some new specification,
then branch at an earlier descision point to either the new
or old code.

>>                           Most of the COBOL work has been
>> outsourced, 
>
>Another meaningless industry buzzword.  Outsourced to who?  I mean

I suspect that even a lot of the fortune x*100 companies
outside to body shops in the BRIC countries.

>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.

If that's the case, it's a pretty insular world.  The average
age of COBOL programmers in the US is 55; that says something.

>>             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 don't think I've seen anyong actively discourage COBOL in 25
years.  For that matter, I don't know that I've seen anyone
actively discuss COBOL in 25 years, either.

>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.

I'm sure some students would want to learn it on general principle,
and that's great.  Same thing with APL, RPG, MUMPS, FORTRAN-77,
UCSD Pascal, and GW-BASIC.  I don't think that should be
discouraged; I've found that having breadth in technology gives
useful perspective.  I also briefly looked up COBOL jobs in my
area (greater Boston) and the salaries are not competitive.  I'm
pretty senior, but still; if people think it's oh-so-important
to attract COBOL programmers, then show me the money: it's not
there.

>> 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?

Active job listings in my area.  Availability of training
environments, materials, and high-quality open source implementations
and tools.

>> 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.

Why is that a loss?  In my opinion, we're practically forcing
too many kids to go to 4 year colleges when they're not really
all that interested in doing so, and then we're saddling them
with crippling debt after they get out.  Part of this is a
level of social contempt for trades; that's very sad.  When I
was in the Marine Corps, I worked with a lot of folks who went
into the trades and they were intelligent, motivated, hard-working,
genuinely wonderful people.  They shouldn't be penalized or
disrespected for not having a burning desire to deconstruct
Baudrillard.

>>> 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.

I went to Columbia.

>Even the
>Jesuits who are primarily and mostly interested in Liberal
>Arts wouldn't share your opinion. (Well, most of them anyway!)

I wonder if, perhaps, your interpretation of my idea is
incompatible with what the Jesuits might say, regardless
of what my idea actually is.

	- Dan C.