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COBOL Technology
Training PerspectiveA Complete COBOL Tutorial for Any Programmer Rui de Oliveira's new book The Power of COBOL is a comprehensive guidebook on the most widely used computer language in the world
The Power of COBOL written by software and teaching expert Rui de Oliveira is the most complete and user-friendly tutorial on the COBOL programming language currently available. Designed to be valuable for veteran programmers just as much as beginners new to the language this book benefits from the author's many years of programming and instructional experience.
Derided by some as an obsolete language that will eventually disappear COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) is proving itself -- since its official adoption in 1960 -- of being a remarkably powerful and resilient language that offers programmers worldwide an opportunity to develop cutting-edge applications in any field. In fact there are more lines of code written in COBOL than any other language and for good reason.
COBOL Wintel generations must bury the hatchet Some pundits and bloggers seem to think that IT belongs to the twentysomethings and that mature IT workers should retire and get out of the way. In a recent interview with SearchDataCenter.com Forrester Research Inc. principal analyst Phil Murphy explains why that sentiment is both naive and counterproductive and what the COBOL and Wintel generations can learn from one another.
What do you think of media and pundits that foster bad blood between IT generations?
Phil Murphy: There is no good that can come from pitting one group of people against another. IT can't get enough done with the folks we have pulling the oars in the same direction. Why in God's name would anybody responsible say The other half of the people are no good they're done.
The danger is that CIOs [chief information officer] ignore it and let it smolder and what's already a bad situation between IT and business becomes less productive.
COBOL: And Then Some Subsequent to my mentioning COBOL in a pair of posts -- COBOL: 'Nuf Said and again in COBOL: Job 1 -- a bunch of you jumped in to fill in the gaps.
For instance the folks at Micro Focus pointed out that 75 percent of the world's business apps run in COBOL and that analysts claim that up to 80 percent of IT budgets now go for maintaining old code. Citing a recent industry survey 62 percent of the respondents used COBOL and 58 percent were creating new applications in COBOL.
Micro Focus was also quick to add that it has just unveiled its Net Express 5.0 a development environment that extends core business processes to the .NET Framework and other distributed platforms.
Research: IT Generation Gap Overblown By now nearly everyone has heard the dismal account of what generational shifts in the technology workforce will mean for the future of IT: The old guard is soon to retire few want to join the new guard and skilled workers are only getting harder to come by.
A report CIOs: Avoid War Between IT's Twentysomethings and More Mature Workers released Oct. 24 by Forrester Research analyst Phil Murphy argues that this position is both irresponsible and just plain wrong.
The report makes a case that a recent sentiment among bloggers and pundits is that mature workers should get out of the way as IT belongs to the twenty-somethings is destructive--by fanning the flames of this underlying rift--and potentially illegal if older workers are actually cast away on account of their age.
In reviewing stories about mature techies the report notes the way these stories have gotten twisted.
COBOL: The New Latin I can't imagine why anyone interested in programming would not jump into this area like a big wet dog jumping on a white couch. Companies will be begging for COBOL-literate people for years to come and based on current trends there will be fewer and fewer people with this expertise. That means the price per head will be going up.
Almost everyone I spoke to about my curriculum for that year had the same reaction. They all asked why I would want to study Latin; it was after all a dead language. People are saying the same thing about COBOL. Don't waste your time learning COBOL. If they put you into a COBOL project your career will be over.
COBOL is for geezers. It's a ... dead language.
COBOL: Job 1 On the heels of my COBOL: Nuf Said post I ran across a set of statistics on the current state of the venerable COmmon Business Oriented Language known as COBOL.
According to a Computerworld survey of 352 companies 62 percent said they still use COBOL -- and 75 percent of that 62 percent said they use it a lot. Moreover 58 percent said they are using it for new application development.
But the problem with COBOL that organizations face isn't a technical one it is a personnel one. They just can't find enough COBOL programmers. According to the Computerworld article written by Gary Anthes 45 percent of the respondents said their ability to hire Cobol programmers was either 'worse' or 'much worse' than their ability to hire programmers for modern languages such as Visual Basic C++ and Java.
The Birth Date Excuse When Shelly my 15-year-old daughter saw the cover of last week’s issue she made no attempt to hide her amusement. “Oh wow ” she laughed. “That guy is so you.”
She was referring to the artwork that accompanied our cover story on the future of COBOL: an illustration of an older gentleman (a “geezer ” as Shelly would put it) with a barbell lifted over his head. The visual metaphor — Cobol is aging but still strong — was lost on my daughter. Since I happen to spend a lot of time in the gym she was just reveling in the opportunity to give me a hard time. I guess we fiftysomethings who work out are inherently comical. You can lift weights from now till the cows come home some would point out but you’re still fiftysomething.
Yeah maybe. But something caught my eye last week that got me thinking about how much more there is to the age-old age question. UK facing £20bn IT skills shortage The UK's software development industry will suffer the same decline as the country's manufacturing sector unless action is taken to tackle the skills shortage according to a report released today.
A study conducted by Microsoft Lancaster University Management School and the British Computer Society found that those involved at the start of the UK software industry three decades ago are now moving towards retirement and there are simply not enough graduates being trained to take their places.
Perhaps the most worrying figure is that the UK is turning out just 20 000 new IT graduates each year.
Business burdened with legacies It isn't just legacy systems that can stifle an organization but legacy thinking.
People resistant to change will not survive changes to the industry according to Gartner analyst Steve Prentice.
Gartner estimates IT jobs will be cut in half by 2010 thereby removing stagnant-minded staff.
The skills of the past are not those required in the future and organizations will find it increasingly difficult to retain necessary expertise in an ageing workforce Prentice said.
The research firm says legacy thinking occurs when attempts to retire or replace systems are undermined by entrenched attitudes towards change fear of the issues and risks involved and budgetary constraints .
Gartner says examples of legacy psyche are it's always been done that way our application is unique and this is core to our business - we cannot change it .
IBM opens AlphaWorks technology to universities
IBM has launched a new program to provide university students and faculty free access to nascent technologies on its alphaWorks site. The goal of the Academic Licensing Program says Marc Goubert manager of IBM's alphaWorks group is to train educate and build a loyal base of future developers on emerging technologies and open standards. We want to spur innovation from universities and our future software engineers Goubert tells ProgrammingTrends. We want to provide students and faculty with new software concepts that wouldn't necessarily be taught otherwise. We feel that working with faculty giving them some of these emerging technology concepts will help us to build a firmer base and a more innovative software developer generation to come. COBOL skills needed in the future
To paraphrase German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche COBOL is dead. Or at least that's what some people in the IT world believe. It's a legacy language with relatively little new development taking place. But the growth of the mainframe of late combined with the staggering amount of COBOL running currently has some experts are questioning whether the 800-pound gorilla is really dead. So Rockville Md.-based Micro Focus International Ltd. decided to poke it with a stick to find out. According to preliminary results of Micro Focus' survey of 750 mainframers in the U.S. and Canada 41% name COBOL as a principal programming language by an approximate 25% margin over Java the next most popular language. Preliminary results also find 52% of mainframe applications are still written in COBOL. C# offers an easy-to-use alternative to Java C# is a programming language from Microsoft designed to work with the .net Framework. It is seen as Microsoft's response to Java which in many ways it resembles. Microsoft broke with long- standing practice with C# by inviting developers to contribute to the language; by getting it ratified by a standards body; and by making the source code available so that versions for other platforms such as Mac and Linux could be developed. The C# Language Specification describes it as a simple modern object-oriented and type-safe programming language derived from C and C++ . C# offers an easy-to-use alternative to Java
C# is a programming language from Microsoft designed to work with the .net Framework. It is seen as Microsoft's response to Java which in many ways it resembles. Microsoft broke with long- standing practice with C# by inviting developers to contribute to the language; by getting it ratified by a standards body; and by making the source code available so that versions for other platforms such as Mac and Linux could be developed. The C# Language Specification describes it as a simple modern object-oriented and type-safe programming language derived from C and C++ . Cognizant in pact with Microsoft
Cognizant Technology Solutions said it had joined Microsoft Corp's mainframe migration alliance to help customers seamlessly migrate critical data and systems to Microsoft.Net-based systems.
Fast Financials; Agri Beef goes online with PeopleSoft in six weeks; replacing legacy systems pursu For many companies an e-business strategy begins with good financial applications. For $500 million Agri Beef though existing financials tools just weren't very strong notes Casey McMullen Agri Beef's director of IS.
Bombardier teaches legacy apps to speak SAP
Before Bombardier Aerospace even decided to implement SAP software in August the Montreal-based aircraft manufacturing company knew it would need an integration platform to make the deployment seamless across its mission-critical applications.
Compliance Bonanzas When was the last time you read about a $40 000 retention bonus for someone with a hot skill in IT? I'll bet it was sometime around the turn of the century when Y2k fears had CEOs wringing their hands and CFOs signing checks for whatever IT asked for.
Circuit to Packet Migration: A Transformational Change in Telecom The migration of the telecommunications network from circuit to packet technologies will be transformational not evolutionary. As such it could be disruptive if not managed carefully. For the past 100 years development of the telephone network has focused on the reliable delivery of simple voice calls. But that single-focused world is now disappearing as service providers begin to cope with the complexities of voice over IP and IP-based services.
Halfords upgrades HR and finance to MySAP
The company which has 400 stores across the UK has been revamping its internal systems since August 2002 when it was bought for £400m by private equity firm CVC. The flotation of Halfords is set for the summer following the appointment of brokers to oversee the process.
http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?
Opening of the Mainframe
Back in 1991 InfoWorld's then Editor in Chief Stewart Alsop predicted the plug would be pulled on the last mainframe in five years. Oops. Eight years after their forecasted demise mainframes today host by most estimates the majority of business transactions and enterprise data. IBM which now enjoys a virtual monopoly on big iron sold $6.8 billion's worth in 2003 a year that saw sales of IBM zSeries mainframes (whose top-end models go by the nickname T-Rex ) jump 33 percent.
JavaOne to yield plethora of tools
IN ADDITION TO featuring endeavors by heavyweights such as Sun Microsystems and Oracle the JavaOne show this week also will host a slew of other companies detailing new wares ranging from development tools for Web services to business-to-business functionality.
Opinion: How IT has outsourced itself
Americans have an unwavering faith that technology can solve all of their problems but they tend to forget that it also creates new ones in the process. The leading edge of technology innovation often cuts both ways. Perhaps the best example of this is the current election-year brouhaha over the accelerating trend of outsourcing U.S. jobs in general -- and IT jobs in particular.
Opinion: How IT has outsourced itself
Americans have an unwavering faith that technology can solve all of their problems but they tend to forget that it also creates new ones in the process. The leading edge of technology innovation often cuts both ways. Perhaps the best example of this is the current election-year brouhaha over the accelerating trend of outsourcing U.S. jobs in general -- and IT jobs in particular.
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