4 ms·

Is there any way to learn the ecosystem? Last time I looked, you couldn’t just spin up z/OS in VMware and start hacking, which made it hard for me to figure out

by gecko 7y ago

Is there any way to learn the ecosystem? Last time I looked, you couldn’t just spin up z/OS in VMware and start hacking, which made it hard for me to figure out how I’d actually learn.

thaumaturgy 7y ago
Intern or junior-level in a COBOL environment, unfortunately. Like others are saying, the problem with COBOL isn't (just) the language itself, it's all of the decades of very delicate cruft that has grown up around it. COBOL-the-language is absurdly simple to the point of being a little brain-damaged; but you have to be able to work in an environment where there's really close coupling between COBOL and its host operating system, and where minor code changes can have unintended consequences in seemingly unrelated applications, and the database isn't transactional, and there's no version control, and...
sigjuice 7y ago
apt search cobol found this. open-cobol/bionic 1.1-2 amd64 COBOL compiler Also, I was hoping to find COBOL on learnxinyminutes.com, but didn't :/
- dpedu 7y ago
  Open-cobol works, but be aware that it translates your source to C and then compiles that. If that doesn't matter to you, great! There's also tiny-cobol[0], but the project is dead and it only targets x86-32. [0] http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net/ http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net/
- xienze 7y ago
  That's not really going to give you a taste for what it's like to "do" COBOL in a real-world scenario. Realistically, no one is running COBOL on a modern Linux. They're running it on something like z/OS and there is so much utterly bizarre and incredibly tedious stuff you have to deal with on those mainframe OS's that you'll run away screaming. And that's not even mentioning the code itself, written over several decades and likely not well documented. When I worked at IBM not TOO long ago there were times when I had to fix a bug in WebSphere that only manifested on z/OS or zLinux and those were hands down the hardest bugs to fix. And that was a relatively modern codebase, by mainframe standards.
  - sigjuice 7y ago
    My way of learning and exploring something new (to me) is to ignore the bizarre and tedious system specific stuff that you mention. I have never even seen COBOL code before. Toy programs that I can easily run on my own computer are more than enough to satisfy my casual (and short-lived) curiosity.
    - StudyAnimal 7y ago
      https://kurthaeusler.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/learning-the-mainframe/ https://kurthaeusler.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/learning-the-m...
  - bencollier49 7y ago
    That's not entirely true, a lot of people have migrated across to, for example, Microfocus COBOL, which runs on Linux and Windows.
  - NikolaNovak 7y ago
    It is true that a lot of legacy COBOL apps are on mainframe. However, not all - I've personally been dealing peripherally with COBOL on UNIX/Linux via IBM or MicroFocus compilers for decades - and it even works on Windows :-O e.g. https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/net-express-server-express/overview https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/net-express-server... https://www.ibm.com/ca-en/marketplace/cobol-compiler-aix https://www.ibm.com/ca-en/marketplace/cobol-compiler-aix

by gecko 7y ago

Is there any way to learn the ecosystem? Last time I looked, you couldn’t just spin up z/OS in VMware and start hacking, which made it hard for me to figure out how I’d actually learn.

thaumaturgy 7y ago

Intern or junior-level in a COBOL environment, unfortunately. Like others are saying, the problem with COBOL isn't (just) the language itself, it's all of the decades of very delicate cruft that has grown up around it. COBOL-the-language is absurdly simple to the point of being a little brain-damaged; but you have to be able to work in an environment where there's really close coupling between COBOL and its host operating system, and where minor code changes can have unintended consequences in seemingly unrelated applications, and the database isn't transactional, and there's no version control, and...

sigjuice 7y ago

apt search cobol found this. open-cobol/bionic 1.1-2 amd64 COBOL compiler Also, I was hoping to find COBOL on learnxinyminutes.com, but didn't :/

dpedu 7y ago
Open-cobol works, but be aware that it translates your source to C and then compiles that. If that doesn't matter to you, great! There's also tiny-cobol[0], but the project is dead and it only targets x86-32. [0] http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net/ http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net/
xienze 7y ago
That's not really going to give you a taste for what it's like to "do" COBOL in a real-world scenario. Realistically, no one is running COBOL on a modern Linux. They're running it on something like z/OS and there is so much utterly bizarre and incredibly tedious stuff you have to deal with on those mainframe OS's that you'll run away screaming. And that's not even mentioning the code itself, written over several decades and likely not well documented. When I worked at IBM not TOO long ago there were times when I had to fix a bug in WebSphere that only manifested on z/OS or zLinux and those were hands down the hardest bugs to fix. And that was a relatively modern codebase, by mainframe standards.
- sigjuice 7y ago
  My way of learning and exploring something new (to me) is to ignore the bizarre and tedious system specific stuff that you mention. I have never even seen COBOL code before. Toy programs that I can easily run on my own computer are more than enough to satisfy my casual (and short-lived) curiosity.
  - StudyAnimal 7y ago
    https://kurthaeusler.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/learning-the-mainframe/ https://kurthaeusler.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/learning-the-m...
- bencollier49 7y ago
  That's not entirely true, a lot of people have migrated across to, for example, Microfocus COBOL, which runs on Linux and Windows.
- NikolaNovak 7y ago
  It is true that a lot of legacy COBOL apps are on mainframe. However, not all - I've personally been dealing peripherally with COBOL on UNIX/Linux via IBM or MicroFocus compilers for decades - and it even works on Windows :-O e.g. https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/net-express-server-express/overview https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/net-express-server... https://www.ibm.com/ca-en/marketplace/cobol-compiler-aix https://www.ibm.com/ca-en/marketplace/cobol-compiler-aix