Release of GnuCOBOL 2.2
lists.gnu.org
lists.gnu.org
I have been interested in this language for quite some time, moved to a different country just to try to find a job where I could learn more about it and build up a career, unfortunately the city that I chose doesn't seems to be have many offers. Most of the jobs require several years of experience doing low level programming, and although I work with system programming languages (C++, Go) I don't have relevant experience working with COBOL which seems to be killing my opportunities.
It's like the chicken or the egg causality dilemma, I want a COBOL job but everyone requires someone with relevant experience, but how can I get experience if no one hires me to work with COBOL? LOL — I am willing to take a junior-intermediate position if necessary, if anyone has a suggestion (company names, job boards, etc).
Thank you in advance.
EDIT: I am in Vancouver, BC, Canada if anyone is interested.
Now, as the exactly what sorts of events you're likely to meet a stereotypical Cobol developer at....I'm not sure. Perhaps look up your local shuffleboard and canasta clubs and go from there. :)
The money seems ok though, but flextime and two hours less per day is worth a lot of money to me.
Out of curiosity: do you mean you find the job prospects interesting, or the language itself? Because I'd understand if it's a money thing, but... I used to work with COBOL and I wouldn't wish the language on anyone.
There are worse things. I'd rather work on Cobol than in PHP4, or in a project where I have to deal with front-end stuff done using JS and back-end stuff that relies on the NPM package ecosystem.
I'm just saying being forced to use COBOL sucks, because it's uninteresting and outdated technology, and mostly nobody would choose it of their own volition, so most COBOL use falls in the category of "being forced to use it". Interest in retrocomputing aside... and there's better retro stuff to be interested in, anyway!
For me, the best way to review source code is to have it printed, where it is easy to annotate.
In fact i think i will buy me a printer at home for the very same purpose.
Seriously, code printouts are an outdated -- and worse, wasteful -- tool. Maybe they were suitable in COBOL's heyday, but not today.
Amazing.
https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font
Won't turn your keyboard into a beam-spring one, but it still feels cool.
Not really cobol/ibm related, but to chime in on the retro term theme there is also the GlassTTY font similarly extracted from a dec VT.
My vintage large font green/amber terminal emulator settings for when I'm feeling lazy shall now grow even further :)
There's a vectorized version of the VT220 font called DEC Terminal Modern which looks pretty good with arbitrary scaling factors.
Oh, and the X11 color "goldenrod" (#daa520) looks pretty close to the amber of amber-phosphor CRTs. :)
They took 7 years to go up to GnuCobol 2.2; congratulations for this task. My congratulations are sincere; COBOL compilers are very expensive (MicroFocus, anyone?), so it is great to have a GNU compiler.
It's not for everybody. You cant do all those cool shit (compared to modern languages and tech stacks) - it has its own stack. One of the main barrier to entry is access to a Mainframe. Sure there are emulators , but nothing beats playing around with the real thing. If IBM really wanted to secure talent , they should really address this. People are willing to pay for access as long as it doesnt burn a hole in one's pocket.
In the meantime, anyone can download and run the public domain MVS 3.8J, it is ancient but it includes a lot of the basic technologies of z/OS (JCL, JES2, VSAM, VTAM, TSO, 3270, etc), just in much older versions (essentially 1970s vintage).
I think TK4- is the easiest way to run it: http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/
I believe TK4- includes the MVT COBOL compiler from 1972 (which was the last COBOL compiler version IBM released into the public domain), although I've never tried it myself.
from the project homepage
"Is it safe?
Of course not! I hacked this together over one night, and without any real knowledge of the language. I suppose the code is utterly horrible."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourc...
Also, their ftp link at the bottom of the message is broken.
There was a discussion about it yesterday too about another project hosted in SourceForge, you can find it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15180586
It's worth remembering that the company that initially tried to do the squeezing spent many years being a decent FLOSS citizen. That's the reason so many open source projects were hosted on Sourceforge in the first place.
I mainly want to do this for the learning experience. New languages/frameworks/etc are cool, but old ones are special in their own way too.
Whether it shines or not in comparison to more modern languages is another matter.
The new stack is sometimes .NET, but it's the same principle you mentioned.
COBOL is English and generally easy to read, and the worst pitfalls are well known. As a result it's also easy to teach to anyone that has the slightest concept of logic. Especially managers, accountants, or other typically non-tech folks that ask for such reports or applications. It's much nicer to write software for folks that understand the limits of the tools being used to create it.
COBOL is a great language for its intended purpose. As it C, python, Lisp, .....name any language in top 50 on TIOBE index.... These days i think of it as a DSL for business transactions.
To those people having a hard time getting a job the biggest hurdles are in the runtime environments. COBOL is so simple you can learn it in a weekend assuming you know programming basics and concepts well. However....runtimes are a different thing. What the hirers are trying to find is people with knowledge in VRx, CICS, JCS and various other obtuse and arcane environments for running COBOL programs and no books are going to give you that. My observation is that why people with no experience in the language get turned away.
However if you do want to use the language it was one of the very first to embrace the concept of transactions and using queues as an ESB for load balancing and true modular, scalable systems. Modular COBOL systems read next item on the que to which they subscribe, get the message content, and then process it, and putting an output message onto another queue. I remember working with a retail system in NZ in mid 80s and it was doing millions of transactions per hour, using tape reels for and those old washing machine disk drives. So called "modern" tools and architectures struggle with such loads. There are banks, airline systems, finance systems the world over that were built with this stuff, and its still running not just because it works, but because nothing better (when one looks holistically at the system) has come along. Mentions in HN, loads of stars on github do not a failsafe financial system make.
i code in python for own projects and c# at work(Im a product manager so im dabbling not full-tilt product dev) and frequently groan at how modern languages make simple things so hard. Yes I knows its a function of environment but sorry, I was programming systems in early 80s that did more, were more reliable, stored data safely on devices that now look only marginally better than stone tablets, and they worked. Business got done.
Also bemoan my loss of productivity as i got sucked into the change-compile-rinse-repeat mentality that pc brought to the world. In old days i could get 1000 line and up COBOl programs working from scratch(no templates, no COPY) within 4 compiles and couple of days max, just by paying attention to what and how i wrote the code.
End of rant.
Im a huge fan of COBOL, Pascal, C#, Python, javascript, Perl, PHP when used for the right things. I have even been known to write some VB when it was the right tool for the job.
Last comment - best wishes with your job hunt. As other posters have suggested, look as far afield as you need to, be brave, take a plunge, and make sure you know your fundamentals so that if COBOL doesnt work for you, you can switch to another 'dialect' of computing and try again.
It was also strongly advisable not to forget your (if I emember correctly uppercase, up to 8 characters and numbers) file names. Hierarchical directory structures? That's probably for Sissies.
Anyway, when I moved to VAX/VMS and after writing my first program I asked a colleague.
"So, how do I comile that?"
"Well, you type:"
cobol $program (or COBOL $PROGRAM, VMS is case agnostic)
I thought he was making fun of me after the Unisys experience, but nope. That was it. (Ok, you then had to link it, which wasn't really more complicated).
To this day I think VMS is the best OS I have ever worked with.
Ahh, you bring back so many great and not so great memories... :)