COBOL Programming, useful?

[Twyst]

At the college I'm currently attending one of the required classes for the Computer Science majors is COBOL programming as well as RPG programming and Fortran 90. Fortran 90 I can almost understand but who still uses COBOL and RPG when there are "better" database applications in the world now. I'm in the middle of COBOL now having already finished RPG but I can't for the life of me invision how this is better than a MySQL dbase with a well crafted PHP script gathering info. I guess I'm asking is: "Does anyone currently use this in their job and do they plan to continue using it through the next year or two?"

[MunterMan]

I dont know about Alabama, but any mainframe still in use in Europe has about 90% of its' core code written in cobol. That is ALL banks and most governments.

How useful is it? Well I have been a programmer for over ten years, starting out in cobol. I don't think I will ever have another job coding cobol. If I do, it will only be maintaining legacy code on a large machine, like a vax or a mainframe.

However it is a great language to learn about structured programming and help you develope good coding habits. I found the transition from cobol to java much easier than cobol to c.

Remember, in the 70's the people that know all said cobol would be extinct by 1985.

[jwreels]

Well I think most COBOL programming done out there is mostly maintain from older programs. However, I was at a job fair yesterday and I saw a couple of companies looking for COBOL programmers. Just a thought.

[gschimek]

I work for a large fortune 500 company and we do most of our programming in COBOL for our DB2 mainframe system. I'm sure there are many better ways to do it out there, but you need to remember the corporate mentality of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I see more often than not, that when something is upgraded, changed, or fixed, it causes a lot of headaches in areas that weren't expected, so companies aren't too excited to change and try something new.

For example, we're now finally trying to get rid of all of our Windows 95 machines, which should be done within the year. :confused:

[Stuka]

Shoot, there's a company here in Houston that sells to a TON of major auto dealers that is hiring COBOL programmers right now.

[ph34r]

A friend got hired recently to move COBOL apps over to a few different languages... basically,any big company that has legacy apps will have probably used cobol... not to mention, a LOT of the cobol trained workforce is either retiring or dead... same for the true mainframe operators.

[Twyst]

Cool, that's basically what I thought, but it's nice to hear it coming from an informed audience. Hard to find an opinion in Alabama that isn't repeated from some other source. I appreciate the feedback.

[blackrax]

Originally posted by ph34r
A friend got hired recently to move COBOL apps over to a few different languages... basically,any big company that has legacy apps will have probably used cobol... not to mention, a LOT of the cobol trained workforce is either retiring or dead... same for the true mainframe operators.

dead? isnt' that a bit harsh? or do all programmers die prematurely? maybe it's radiation poisoning from those old screens we all used to have?

[dr_te_z]

(not) to mention the possibility to use cobol on your linux machine.

commercial:
- Micro Focus cobol
- AcuCobol
- RMcobol

or open source:
- Tinycobol
- opencobol

I've worked with Micro Focus and I'm playing with the open-source variants.
Works great. Your cobol source is converted to either assembler (tiny) or C code (opencobol) and then fed to gcc.