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For fun: Nim or any modern Lisp. For profit: COBOL.

by imiric 5y ago

devKnight 5y ago
can you effectively learn COBOL without having access to mainframes/the hardware it usually runs on? I know that there are COBOL envs that can run on all major operating systems for practice. But has anyone been able to learn it at home per say and then transitioned to working on production COBOL codebases?
- imiric 5y ago
  I can't answer your last question, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. From what I've seen there are z/OS emulators that can be used for practice, so it wouldn't be far fetched to transition to real hardware from there. A quick search for COBOL resources yielded https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-course https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... , so it seems possible to learn without access to the hardware.
anta40 5y ago
How would you suggets developers born in mid 80s/90s to learn COBOL and find COBOL jobs? As far as I know, practically there are no COBOL jobs around me anymore. Big established institutions like telco and bank usually use Java. On the other side, the younger kids usually prefer something like NodeJS or Go.
- imiric 5y ago
  It's certainly not as straighforward as learning a more popular language and environment, but there are online resources if you look for them. A quick search yielded https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-course https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... There appears to be an active community around it, and I'm sure getting help in an apprenticeship sort of way is possible. Again, we're talking about a niche language, so you can't expect the same level of accessibility as NodeJS or Go. As for finding jobs, they're probably few and far between, but appear to be well paid from what I've heard. Places that need COBOL programmers will announce it, opportunities will likely come up from other contacts in the community, and cold contacting companies you know are using it is always an option.

For fun: Nim or any modern Lisp. For profit: COBOL.

by imiric 5y ago

For fun: Nim or any modern Lisp. For profit: COBOL.

can you effectively learn COBOL without having access to mainframes/the hardware it usually runs on? I know that there are COBOL envs that can run on all major operating systems for practice. But has anyone been able to learn it at home per say and then transitioned to working on production COBOL codebases?

imiric 5y ago
I can't answer your last question, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. From what I've seen there are z/OS emulators that can be used for practice, so it wouldn't be far fetched to transition to real hardware from there. A quick search for COBOL resources yielded https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-course https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... , so it seems possible to learn without access to the hardware.

anta40 5y ago

How would you suggets developers born in mid 80s/90s to learn COBOL and find COBOL jobs? As far as I know, practically there are no COBOL jobs around me anymore. Big established institutions like telco and bank usually use Java. On the other side, the younger kids usually prefer something like NodeJS or Go.

imiric 5y ago
It's certainly not as straighforward as learning a more popular language and environment, but there are online resources if you look for them. A quick search yielded https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-course https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... There appears to be an active community around it, and I'm sure getting help in an apprenticeship sort of way is possible. Again, we're talking about a niche language, so you can't expect the same level of accessibility as NodeJS or Go. As for finding jobs, they're probably few and far between, but appear to be well paid from what I've heard. Places that need COBOL programmers will announce it, opportunities will likely come up from other contacts in the community, and cold contacting companies you know are using it is always an option.