4 ms·

Mainframe on the Macbook

41 points by mbellotti 8y ago

justherefortart 8y ago
COBOL is terrible to work in. I was forced to take it in my MIS program in the 90s. We had the option of taking COBOL II or C Programming. Easiest choice I ever made (C of course). They touted how everyone would be able to get a job fixing Y2K bugs. All I could imagine was a job like Peter Gibbons. I wanted to work in future technologies, not those of yesteryear. Thank goodness the internet was taking off by the mid 90s, so it was easy to see where things were going.
marpstar 8y ago
> Despite the fact that virtually no one learns COBOL anymore Is this true? I mean, I know coding boot camp programs aren't emphasizing in COBOL, but I graduated from University of Wisconsin-Platteville in 2010 and was required to take a COBOL class. I asked our intern this year (also from UWP) and he confirmed that it's still a required course. I did my first internship building an operations management system for auto dealerships using AcuCOBOL. Using COBOL, particularly when binding to a GUI, was painful. edit: missed "aren't" in my second sentence.
- jamescostian 8y ago
  I'm a CS undergrad, and my university doesn't teach COBOL in any classes. Sometimes, professors will try to tell us about things in an old language, but then realize there are very low chances the class will be familiar with that language. Many professors have asked if anyone in the room actually knows the language (COBOL, Pascal, Fortran, Scheme, Smalltalk, or something with similar age and popularity) and I'd say there's never more than 2% of people in the class who say they have.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  I find it very odd that any CS program in the USA teaches COBOL. I would guess this very unique to your program and it isn’t common. India might have more COBOL courses since they specialized in it during the 90s (paid off during Y2K), but 20 years on even there I’m doubtful.
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
    I would guess that UW-P has a local corporate donor who uses Cobol and recruits at the school.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Is UW-P private? It would be very odd for a CS faculty to agree to that. More likely they have one or many very senior professors who are still very much into COBOL.
      - marpstar 8y ago
        UW-P is a public university in Wisconsin. And you're right: the chair of the department when I was there was a huge proponent of COBOL. I know classmates who went on to do quite well working with COBOL in finance industries. I'd never have been able to tolerate it long term, regardless of pay.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    From April 2018: Companies involved in keeping COBOL-based systems working say that 95 percent of ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs, 80 percent of in-person transactions rely on them, and over 40 percent of banks still use COBOL as the foundation of their systems. “Our COBOL business is bigger than it has ever been,” said Chris Livesey, senior vice president and general manager at Micro Focus, a company that offers modern COBOL coding and development frameworks. Source: https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-way-down/ https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-wa...
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Sure, but that says nothing about university-leve education.
      - reaperducer 8y ago
        Seriously? If you don't see the connection between learning a skill and job demand for that skill, then you don't deserve to be in college.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Penn State still teaches COBOL[3]. Rutgers has classes that require COBOL[2]. COBOL is also available at University of Southern California[0], Iowa State[1], and California State University[4]. And those are just a bunch of universities I picked off the top of my head. Anyone who thinks COBOL is dead is misinformed. There's obviously a need for it, or it wouldn't be offered. According to this article[5] from last month, COBOL is still widely used in the financial industry. [0]:https://cse.sc.edu/class https://cse.sc.edu/class [1]:http://catalog.iastate.edu/previouscatalogs/2014-15/azcourses/com_s/ http://catalog.iastate.edu/previouscatalogs/2014-15/azcourse... [2]:http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nwk-ug_0608/pg23255.html http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nwk-ug_0608/pg23255.ht... [3]:http://undergraduate.bulletins.psu.edu/university-course-descriptions/undergraduate/cmpsc/cmpsc.pdf http://undergraduate.bulletins.psu.edu/university-course-des... [4]:https://catalog.csustan.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=9&coid=10048 https://catalog.csustan.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=... [5]https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-way-down/ https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-wa...
le-mark 8y ago
But to be fair this doesn’t really install COBOL on your computer. GnuCOBOL is a transpiler that parses COBOL and converts it to C before compiling it. This feels a bit like cheating. This is curious statement, what is cheating about it? I suppose this person equates Cobol with mainframes, and wants the Real Experience. Hopefully the author doesn't go down the rat hole of setting up Hercules with a 1970's era version of MVS operating system, and tries to learn enough JCL to execute the compiler. That's truly a waste of time. Besides, not all machines that ran Cobol were EBCDIC, there were (are) a lot of ASCII machines, including anything running GnuCobol. The key thing you're learning about with Cobol is fixed length files, and storage formats like Display, Zoned Decimal, Packed, and Binary. Otherwise the article has some good links and solid history. I personally think Cobol and the mainframe model of resource sandboxing has some things to teach us today, but few are interested.
- emersonrsantos 8y ago
  > Hopefully the author doesn't go down the rat hole of setting up Hercules with a 1970's era version of MVS operating system, and tries to learn enough JCL to execute the compiler. That's truly a waste of time. Why? Cobol, JCL, RPG, ..., run on modern IBM MVS (OS/390, z/OS), unmodified. If someone seeks to learn IBM mainframe systems internals and don't have access to modern software, Hercules-390 and MVS 3.8 it's a viable option to get started as an application or systems programmer. IBM has its own turnkey system called z/PDT so you can run a mainframe on your laptop, something that Hercules-390 can do too.
- gaius 8y ago
  has some things to teach us today, but few are interested The mainframe style is being reinvented in half-arsed way as “microservices”, they are super fashionable right now. I shudder to think what monstrosity the full stack crowd will come up with when they try to reinvent CICS too...
  - twic 8y ago
    Generation X had a go at it with Tuxedo and the early versions of Java EE. I'm actually looking forward to the millennials' attempt, so we're not alone in our shame.
doggydogs94 8y ago
I guess I will try out gnu cobol to see how well it functions. The test will be how well it handles files.
bobbydreamer 8y ago
Only reason for cloud to be popular was IBM MAINFRAME is expensive. MIPS way of billing is complexer. The way things are going cloud is a going expensive. Blue metal still rocks.
lokedhs 8y ago
I've been playing with GNU COBOL for fun, and while it implements a lot of the language, it lacks integration with external systems. For example, you'd expect there to be a simple way to open a network connection. I mean, doing REST calls is one of the fundamental ways you communicate with other services these days. Well, GNU COBOL has no such libraries. Another thing COBOL is famous for is good SQL integration. As far as I understand you have language-level integration with DB2 on the mainframes. Doing the same on Linux with Postgres would be nice, but there is no database integration at all. You're limited to flat files, whose names are hardcoded in the source code.

41 points by mbellotti 8y ago

COBOL is terrible to work in. I was forced to take it in my MIS program in the 90s. We had the option of taking COBOL II or C Programming. Easiest choice I ever made (C of course). They touted how everyone would be able to get a job fixing Y2K bugs. All I could imagine was a job like Peter Gibbons. I wanted to work in future technologies, not those of yesteryear. Thank goodness the internet was taking off by the mid 90s, so it was easy to see where things were going.

marpstar 8y ago

> Despite the fact that virtually no one learns COBOL anymore Is this true? I mean, I know coding boot camp programs aren't emphasizing in COBOL, but I graduated from University of Wisconsin-Platteville in 2010 and was required to take a COBOL class. I asked our intern this year (also from UWP) and he confirmed that it's still a required course. I did my first internship building an operations management system for auto dealerships using AcuCOBOL. Using COBOL, particularly when binding to a GUI, was painful. edit: missed "aren't" in my second sentence.

jamescostian 8y ago
I'm a CS undergrad, and my university doesn't teach COBOL in any classes. Sometimes, professors will try to tell us about things in an old language, but then realize there are very low chances the class will be familiar with that language. Many professors have asked if anyone in the room actually knows the language (COBOL, Pascal, Fortran, Scheme, Smalltalk, or something with similar age and popularity) and I'd say there's never more than 2% of people in the class who say they have.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
I find it very odd that any CS program in the USA teaches COBOL. I would guess this very unique to your program and it isn’t common. India might have more COBOL courses since they specialized in it during the 90s (paid off during Y2K), but 20 years on even there I’m doubtful.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  I would guess that UW-P has a local corporate donor who uses Cobol and recruits at the school.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Is UW-P private? It would be very odd for a CS faculty to agree to that. More likely they have one or many very senior professors who are still very much into COBOL.
    - marpstar 8y ago
      UW-P is a public university in Wisconsin. And you're right: the chair of the department when I was there was a huge proponent of COBOL. I know classmates who went on to do quite well working with COBOL in finance industries. I'd never have been able to tolerate it long term, regardless of pay.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  From April 2018: Companies involved in keeping COBOL-based systems working say that 95 percent of ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs, 80 percent of in-person transactions rely on them, and over 40 percent of banks still use COBOL as the foundation of their systems. “Our COBOL business is bigger than it has ever been,” said Chris Livesey, senior vice president and general manager at Micro Focus, a company that offers modern COBOL coding and development frameworks. Source: https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-way-down/ https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-wa...
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Sure, but that says nothing about university-leve education.
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      Seriously? If you don't see the connection between learning a skill and job demand for that skill, then you don't deserve to be in college.
reaperducer 8y ago
Penn State still teaches COBOL[3]. Rutgers has classes that require COBOL[2]. COBOL is also available at University of Southern California[0], Iowa State[1], and California State University[4]. And those are just a bunch of universities I picked off the top of my head. Anyone who thinks COBOL is dead is misinformed. There's obviously a need for it, or it wouldn't be offered. According to this article[5] from last month, COBOL is still widely used in the financial industry. [0]:https://cse.sc.edu/class https://cse.sc.edu/class [1]:http://catalog.iastate.edu/previouscatalogs/2014-15/azcourses/com_s/ http://catalog.iastate.edu/previouscatalogs/2014-15/azcourse... [2]:http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nwk-ug_0608/pg23255.html http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nwk-ug_0608/pg23255.ht... [3]:http://undergraduate.bulletins.psu.edu/university-course-descriptions/undergraduate/cmpsc/cmpsc.pdf http://undergraduate.bulletins.psu.edu/university-course-des... [4]:https://catalog.csustan.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=9&coid=10048 https://catalog.csustan.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=... [5]https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-way-down/ https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-wa...

le-mark 8y ago

But to be fair this doesn’t really install COBOL on your computer. GnuCOBOL is a transpiler that parses COBOL and converts it to C before compiling it. This feels a bit like cheating. This is curious statement, what is cheating about it? I suppose this person equates Cobol with mainframes, and wants the Real Experience. Hopefully the author doesn't go down the rat hole of setting up Hercules with a 1970's era version of MVS operating system, and tries to learn enough JCL to execute the compiler. That's truly a waste of time. Besides, not all machines that ran Cobol were EBCDIC, there were (are) a lot of ASCII machines, including anything running GnuCobol. The key thing you're learning about with Cobol is fixed length files, and storage formats like Display, Zoned Decimal, Packed, and Binary. Otherwise the article has some good links and solid history. I personally think Cobol and the mainframe model of resource sandboxing has some things to teach us today, but few are interested.

emersonrsantos 8y ago
> Hopefully the author doesn't go down the rat hole of setting up Hercules with a 1970's era version of MVS operating system, and tries to learn enough JCL to execute the compiler. That's truly a waste of time. Why? Cobol, JCL, RPG, ..., run on modern IBM MVS (OS/390, z/OS), unmodified. If someone seeks to learn IBM mainframe systems internals and don't have access to modern software, Hercules-390 and MVS 3.8 it's a viable option to get started as an application or systems programmer. IBM has its own turnkey system called z/PDT so you can run a mainframe on your laptop, something that Hercules-390 can do too.
gaius 8y ago
has some things to teach us today, but few are interested The mainframe style is being reinvented in half-arsed way as “microservices”, they are super fashionable right now. I shudder to think what monstrosity the full stack crowd will come up with when they try to reinvent CICS too...
- twic 8y ago
  Generation X had a go at it with Tuxedo and the early versions of Java EE. I'm actually looking forward to the millennials' attempt, so we're not alone in our shame.

doggydogs94 8y ago

I guess I will try out gnu cobol to see how well it functions. The test will be how well it handles files.

bobbydreamer 8y ago

Only reason for cloud to be popular was IBM MAINFRAME is expensive. MIPS way of billing is complexer. The way things are going cloud is a going expensive. Blue metal still rocks.

lokedhs 8y ago

I've been playing with GNU COBOL for fun, and while it implements a lot of the language, it lacks integration with external systems. For example, you'd expect there to be a simple way to open a network connection. I mean, doing REST calls is one of the fundamental ways you communicate with other services these days. Well, GNU COBOL has no such libraries. Another thing COBOL is famous for is good SQL integration. As far as I understand you have language-level integration with DB2 on the mainframes. Doing the same on Linux with Postgres would be nice, but there is no database integration at all. You're limited to flat files, whose names are hardcoded in the source code.