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Comment by fredsmith219 | Hacker News Reader

Learning COBOL is easy. If you want a good skill for those rare low-paying COBOL jobs, learn JCL. That is the secret sauce that glues together IBM Mainframe databases, COBOL programs, and user interfaces. Any legacy application will be a chain of JCL jobs linking input and output from several COBOL programs. This only applies to IBM mainframes. The State of Michigan uses Burroughs/Unisys mainframes running COBOL, but I don’t know what those use to control job flow and input/output.

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We learned COBOL, CICS, and JCL in college (in the early aughts), because we had a lot of industries in our town that still relied on them, so they were churning out programmers that could actually apply for those jobs as the older programmers were retired.

COBOL was fine, ultimately. Clunky, but functional. CICS was less fine, but still something you could adapt to. JCL was _miserable._ I honestly cannot remember why, I've blocked as much of it from my mind as I could, I suppose, but I remember every part of JCL being awful and no fun to work with.

Your memories are correct lol! JCL is absolutely miserable. But essential if you are going to be working on IBM mainframes.

Same here, I think Fidelity (the bank) had a large hand in it. We had IBM mainframe access and it was an interesting class. Our professor told us he did all sorts of consulting jobs around COBOL and there was a lot of money to be made.

"SYSIN DD *" was a college days incantation. Purely out of curiosity I've searched for JCL resources on the web but have come up with zilch.

Everything for IBM 360 mainframe, including JCL, COBOL and Fortran is in https://www.amazon.com/Programming-IBM-360-Clarence-Germain/... (cheaper on eBay)

Never used COBOL section though, but everything else was excellent: jcl, Fortran and how to operate the equipment. The Russian translation was THE main programming textbook in Moscow State University in 1970s.

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