• COBOL: You're Thinking Ab

    From Dumas Walker@DIGDIST/CAPCITY2 to ALL on Wed Mar 8 09:39:00 2023
    Found a link to this article on osnews.com.

    COBOL - You're Thinking About It Wrong

    "...[W]hile headlines might indicate the language had fallen into disfavor,
    the amount of COBOL in use continues to grow, with 800 billion lines running
    in production systems daily, according to a global survey conducted last year by enterprise software firm Micro Focus. COBOL is considered strategic by 92% of survey respondents, and over half said they expect their organizations to keep running their COBOL applications for at least another 10 years.

    "COBOL suffers from a 'major image problem' that stems from fundamental misperceptions. When a group of academic and industry researchers asked members of the COBOL Working Group of the Open Mainframe Project to rank the top five COBOL misperceptions, the top opinions were that the language is outdated, hard to learn and a bad career choice.

    "None of that is true, the researchers wrote in the December 2022 paper... Unlike modern programming languages that require specific syntax, COBOL is relatively simple to learn. It was developed 'o be easy to read, understand, and program for programmers in the 1960s who had few explicit training opportunities,' the paper said.

    The article goes on to speculate that the COBOL's perception problem stems from "IT leaders" who were familiar with COBOL longer being the ones making decisions
    It also mentions how the lack of COBOL training and programmers lead to the issues that government unemployment systems had during the increased system demand caused by the pandemic.

    More here: https://gcn.com/cloud-infrastructure/2023/01/cobol-youre-thinking-about-it-wrong
    /381563/

    https://tinyurl.com/3maz6md7


    * SLMR 2.1a * "And there she was, like disco superfly..."

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