All it takes to learn any language is a bit of time and effort. Still, sounds like it may be a good idea to teach myself COBOL no matter how much I may hate it because that will allow me to dictate my salary :P
And what happens when those servers die? Do they still find replacement parts and people that knows how to fix them? And if yes... for how long?
Because yes, you can certainly still learn COBOL... but what about finding replacement parts for an old server that soon enough no one will even know how to fix?
A lot of the stuff has already been virtualized and also, part of the IBM mainframe claim to fame is that you can take a program from the 50s and with little to nop changes, run it on modern hardware. COBOL isn't going away anytime soon in the industries that still use it.
Anyone who understands memory management and pointers can write code in Cobol/fortran/C/C++/pascal etc. All the developers are interchangeable given a couple days to get use to the syntax and libraries.
7 comments
3 u/Norm 14 May 2017 22:57
I learned a bit of cobol in college, not like it's a hard language to learn, just have to have someone willing.
0 u/RevanProdigalKnight 15 May 2017 00:22
All it takes to learn any language is a bit of time and effort. Still, sounds like it may be a good idea to teach myself COBOL no matter how much I may hate it because that will allow me to dictate my salary :P
0 u/Norm 15 May 2017 00:29
not a bad idea to learn a bit of mainframe assembly and jcl as well if that's what you want.
0 u/WakkoWarner 15 May 2017 01:03
And what happens when those servers die? Do they still find replacement parts and people that knows how to fix them? And if yes... for how long?
Because yes, you can certainly still learn COBOL... but what about finding replacement parts for an old server that soon enough no one will even know how to fix?
3 u/Wowbagger 15 May 2017 01:18
A lot of the stuff has already been virtualized and also, part of the IBM mainframe claim to fame is that you can take a program from the 50s and with little to nop changes, run it on modern hardware. COBOL isn't going away anytime soon in the industries that still use it.
1 u/DickHertz 21 Jun 2017 00:41
Old server? This shit runs on mainframes.
0 u/BitterBiped 16 May 2017 14:24
Anyone who understands memory management and pointers can write code in Cobol/fortran/C/C++/pascal etc. All the developers are interchangeable given a couple days to get use to the syntax and libraries.