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I imagine it's pretty difficult. I'm not a mainframe programmer, but from my understanding you not only have to understand the COBOL languages, but various main
by non-entity 7y ago
I imagine it's pretty difficult. I'm not a mainframe programmer, but from my understanding you not only have to understand the COBOL languages, but various mainframe environment parts like the OS, APIs, databases, etc.
- commandlinefan 7y agoI did mainframe COBOL for a few years in the 90’s (Y2K fixes). It’s actually not that difficult - I could probably bring a Java developer up to speed on it in less than a month. COBOL is actually extremely easy to program in, but it’s also limited in its expressiveness, so you end up repeating yourself a lot, which leads to complex debugging sessions.
- OGWhales 7y agoIf you are already a decent programmer then switching to cobol can be easy. Cobol still uses the same logic, just with less fancy tools available. That other stuff really isn’t that hard. Most of it is copy and paste-able once someone explains it to you. It’s really easy. It could also likely be handled by someone else for a situation like this with new-comers simply writing cobol.