How useful is it to learn COBOL?
>>108793653zero unless you already have a job and are being offered the position and they have some boomer lined up to transfer you the business knowledge, other than that they already have indians trained on that shit and theres AI hype train of migrating this shit to java.
>>108793653what >>108793963 said, even FORTRAN would be more productive
>>108793653COBOL isn't the issue. The rest of these mainframes are. It's fucking cancer to work on these.The actual code is trivial.
You might be able to get a job with it once the boomers die off, since the COBOL systems still running are insanely hard to replace.You WILL fucking hate it though. There is a reason the industry dropped it in the 80s.
>>108793653As useful as learning chinese, you will have to work in china for the rest of you life and deal with their bullshit culture
>>108794892It's fucking cancer to work with COBOL in general too.
>>108794893I think the COBOL hate is overblown, personally. I blame people mindlessly parroting Dijkstra.
>>108793653It's pretty useful to join a exclusive club.
Went back to school. Took an elective, COBOL. Have a job straight out of school writing COBOL. Don't care for the language but a job is a job. This is about the only context I'd recommend learning it - you plan to get a job in it.
>>108793653I've worked with Cobol, translating some old interest calculation thing to Java. 10k lines in a single file. Functions are just gotos, there are no scopes every variable is global.It was nothing special and was pretty easy to understand because the limitations forced the programmers to be more careful (for example they had some variable rezerved for loops/conditions, returns, etc. so it was pretty hard to make mistakes). Figuring out the PIC clauses is a bit annoying because they have their quirks.So in short, you don't need to learn it, it's trivial to use if you need to.The hard part would be learning the batching language used to execute Cobol. And you won't have anybody hear tell you about that nor do they even know what that is because they are all lying when they say they "worked with Cobol".
>>108794901don't badmouth Chinese women or else.they are literally saving the west
>>108794892This. COBOL only runs on IBM mainframes, keeping it alive will be more expensive in the long term than migrating the codebase to a modern architecture.
>>108794893>since the COBOL systems still running are insanely hard to replacet. IBM shill
>>108793653What Cobol? You can't just learn the syntax (esp. modern Cobol) as >>108794892 said it's old mainframes you're working with. They're used in the Finnish banking sector (and probably in other countries too) They're expensive to replace and hard to interface with AI, pay is good, not as good as big-tech but more stable, especially now. I hate when boomers say shit like "just learn Cobol", like it's Python or something because they write articles about how much they make. They train people specifically for the mainframes since there's a lack of documentation and the boomers are gonna die or retire at somepoint.
