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"So, how do we reskill a workforce to adapt not only to challenges of the new but also to cope with the legacy of the old? Universities in conjunction with majo

"So, how do we reskill a workforce to adapt not only to challenges of the new but also to cope with the legacy of the old? Universities in conjunction with major employers should work together to address this issue." I think the market will take care of this, rather than universities. It is simple supply and demand. If COBOL programmers get paid enough of a premium, people will learn COBOL. This is an order of magnitude more likely than finding professors to teach a language they dislike. Even 20 years ago few students were lining up for university COBOL courses.

arethuza 15y ago
"If COBOL programmers get paid enough of a premium, people will learn COBOL" I've never understood why it is always presented as a bad thing for free market economics to apply to hiring people to do shitty jobs.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Its hard enough to get good programmers to write in cool languages - tried to hire some lately? It seems obvious, in a programmer shortage, that nobody good is going to go work for this cutting-edge(!?) IT company.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    Pay me £500K a year and I'd learn Cobol and I'm in Edinburgh :-) Pay me £600K a year and I'd even wear a suit and tie. Actually, I suspect that I'd probably start writing something to convert COBOL to/from s-expressions and automate any changes to be made.
    - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
      ...now to get suits to pay that much for a COBOL programmer! They probably would rather die. Maybe by marketing it right - you're a C2D (COBOL to Die) conversion consultant, ready to do the heavy lifting to modernize their obsolete codebase...
      - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
        Oh, they already exist. ateras.com, cobol-conversions.com, datatek-net.com, coboltojava.com and on and on.
        arethuza 15y ago
        Aren't those just direct translations? I imagine the resulting Java must look lovely! Whereas if you had a COBOL parse tree as an s-expression it might be much easier to write "smart" code to do the changes and then write out the results back to COBOL.

arethuza 15y ago

"If COBOL programmers get paid enough of a premium, people will learn COBOL" I've never understood why it is always presented as a bad thing for free market economics to apply to hiring people to do shitty jobs.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Its hard enough to get good programmers to write in cool languages - tried to hire some lately? It seems obvious, in a programmer shortage, that nobody good is going to go work for this cutting-edge(!?) IT company.
- arethuza 15y ago
  Pay me £500K a year and I'd learn Cobol and I'm in Edinburgh :-) Pay me £600K a year and I'd even wear a suit and tie. Actually, I suspect that I'd probably start writing something to convert COBOL to/from s-expressions and automate any changes to be made.
  - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
    ...now to get suits to pay that much for a COBOL programmer! They probably would rather die. Maybe by marketing it right - you're a C2D (COBOL to Die) conversion consultant, ready to do the heavy lifting to modernize their obsolete codebase...
    - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
      Oh, they already exist. ateras.com, cobol-conversions.com, datatek-net.com, coboltojava.com and on and on.
      - arethuza 15y ago
        Aren't those just direct translations? I imagine the resulting Java must look lovely! Whereas if you had a COBOL parse tree as an s-expression it might be much easier to write "smart" code to do the changes and then write out the results back to COBOL.