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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 2/19/22 21:07, Dan Cross wrote:
> 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.

Maybe, but an opinion based on almost 30 years  in academia right thru
the time when all this happened.

> 
>>>                                                  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.

Then you must not know many currently teaching at American
Universities.

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

Then why do you think colleges all removed COBOL from their curriculum?

> 
>>>>> 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?

Because it is a skill needed badly in the real world and up until
about two decades ago they had no problem filling that need.

> 
>> 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.

Well, they do teach CSS and HTML and PHP and JavaScript.
Visual Basic not so much any more, but they did teach that,
too.

> Should universities teach carpentry, plumbing or iron work?

Some colleges do, believe it or not.  We have at least one locally.
Used to be a trade school.  Now it's a college. In a few years if
it grows any more it will likely be a University.

> These are all important things; what is the domain of a
> university and what is not?

Primarily, since at least the early 1900's it has been to
educate white collar workers as well as the educated wealthy
who have no intention of getting a job anyway.  (One of my
high school classmates started college right after high school.
He got an undergrad engineering degree.  then he got an undergrad
Math degree.  Then he got an undergrad English degree.  If he
had not been killed in an accident he would probably still be
acquiring undergrad degrees.  :-)

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

They do teach fundamentals.  But unless you think that college
grads have no need of getting a job when they graduate they will
need to learn a lot more than just fundamentals and theory.

> 
>> 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.

There are some.  But the majority are written by professional
textbook writers or professors who have never held a real world
job.  Neither of which I consider 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.

They do.

> 
>>>                          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.

All of academia is a cabal.  Just like a lot of the recent arguments
(that most people think are just politics) about "science" Comp Sci
goes the same way.  Once a decision is made no one who plans on his
career as a professor continuing will buck them.  One bad review on
a paper (or worse still refusal to even review your papers) and your
career is over.  Publish or perish is alive and well.

> 
>>> 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.

Yeah, we had one of them.  Taught by one of the learned professors
who was against COBOL.  The course called "Programming Languages"
did not mention it at all.  It had the students look at and even
write programs Smalltalk and Prolog, both long dead, but failed to
even mention COBOL.

> 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.

Sadly, compiler courses are becoming scarce as well.  My Department
dumped their last compiler course almost as long ago as COBOL.

> 
>>> 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.

A number of the professors when I was there had started as
Math Profs and took part in the formation of the Comp Sci
Dept.  Did you ever here of Harlan Herrick?  He was very
big in the creation of Fortran.  He ended his career as a
professor in my Department.  He's buried some where here
in Scranton.

> 
> 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, 

Trust me, it was tried.  The company involved used to pay for a
lot of their employees to take Grad classes from us.  We had a
Software Engineering Masters Program.  When the classes taught
stopped meeting their needs they stopped paying for their
employees to come.


>                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.

Well, personally, I don't think anyone should be allowed to be a
professor without first having real world experience with what
they plan to teach.   Of the 12 Professors I worked with in my
department only two had ever held a job as anything other than
a professor.  And one of those had only had one non-academic job.

> 
>>> 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.
> 

I guess I just don't get your point with the PERFORM -- THRU
stuff.  Don't see how that would differ from begin-end or {}
in other languages.  But then, I was taught structured COBOL
from the beginning which stressed good program structure and
design as opposed to the spaghetti code that was common in the
day (and not just in COBOL or BASIC.  I  have seen some really
scary Fortran as well.)

>>>                            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.

Funny thing about that is if you follow the COBOL world you would be
amazed at how little the locations we usually associate wit "out
sourcing" know of COBOL either.

> 
>> 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.

Yeah, it says that replacements are hard to find and getting harder.
Something that will have to change because the code is not going away.

> 
>>>              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.  

I watched it for at least the last 15 years I worked at the University.

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

I used to do it all the time.  And got good comments from the students
I talked with.  Given the opportunity I am sure many of them would have
taken a COBOL course.  But again, without a lot of support from the
faculty it would have been a non-starter.  When your intent is to get
out of there in the four years allocated there is no room in your
schedule for even one extra 3 credit course.

> 
>> 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,

MUMPS is still very much in use.  Like COBOL you are probably
touched by it more times than you think.

> 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.

Yeah, I keep hearing that.  But then I go out and find 6 figure
COBOL jobs.  The one thing I notice the most about these jobs
on places like Indeed and Monster (who pretty much have the
exact same jobs cause all they really do is scrape other places
websites) have "estimated pay" because most of the places that
use COBOL are old school and don't make that kind of igformation
public.  And their "estimatees" seem to always be low balled.  I
know this from looking at other jobs in fields and with companies
that I have first hand experience with.

> 
>>> 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.  

Where you live can have a large effect on that.  Where I live
the majority of computer jobs are low level Windows jobs.  Sadly,
I have watched most of the better computer stuff get moved away.
A number of years ago Mellon Bank bought the biggest local bank.
First action was to move all Data Processing to Pittsburgh.  Didn't
even offer the current employees here transfer opportunities.
Procter and Gamble has a large facility here.  Mostly an HPUX
shop.  While they are constantly hiring factory floor workers
from the local community they have never advertised for people
here to work with the real computers.  All of those people are
hired in Cincinatti at HQ.  They do have PC monkeys locally but
even the company with that contract is not local.

>                                 Availability of training

That's the big problem.  All the local colleges (and we have a good
dozen) used to teach COBOL.  None of them do today.

> environments, materials, and high-quality open source implementations
> and tools.

Open Source?  Take a look at GnuCOBOL.  Full featured.  Very stable.
Interfaces well to database systems (including Oracle the last I heard).
Has COBOL specific IDE's but others like Eclipse can handle COBOL as
well.

> 
>>> 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.

There is a value to the liberal arts side of education which
one does not get in a trade school.  The students loss.
There is money to be made teaching COBOL.  The University's
loss.  :-)

> 
>>>> 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.

Like Georgetown, Columbia's primary function seemed to be turning out
white collar workers.  Used to have quite the Comp Sci program there.
I had quite a bit of contact because of the Kermit project.  Some
of the Kermit binaries were actually built on system's in my house
by Frank DaCruz.  When I lived up at West Point I used to see football
from Columbia on Saturday mornings. Sometimes I was the only one
watching them play.  :-)

> 
>> 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.

I have found that if you put 10 Jesuits in a room and asked for
the official standing on any subject you are most likely to get
15 different answers.


bill