COBOL skills are still in huge demand
Written by Writer on Friday, October 3rd, 2008
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COBOL skills are still in huge demand
COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language, was one of the original languages after Assembly that dates back to 1959. It is the language that did, and still does, automate many businesses around the world.
Here is a sample based on the RM/1 COBOL compiler.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.
SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
DATA DIVISION.
FILE SECTION.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
BEGIN.
DISPLAY ” ” LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
DISPLAY “Hello world!” LINE 15 POSITION 10.
STOP RUN.
MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
EXIT.
COBOL is still used by many large organisations and along with RPG still probably leads the world in operating lines of code and applications. Not convinced? In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world’s business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually. Addressing one earlier criticism the COBOL 2002 standard includes support for object-oriented programming and other modern language features and Fujitsu even has a NetCOBOL that integrates right into Visual Studio and your .NET environment.
So why am I writing about such an old language? There is still a huge demand for people with COBOL skills, mostly for maintenance work. Fujitsu’s NetCOBOL for .NET is a COBOL compiler will take standard COBOL code and allow you to play with it under .NET. As you might expect it produces Microsoft’s MSIL or intermediate code that runs under the Common Language Runtime (CLR). You can also mix the COBOL with C# and VB .NET code.
Your existing COBOL applications can also take advantage of the .NET Framework classes. This means that you can add, say, XML Web Services and ASP.Net to your existing code. Bored COBOL programmers may want to take note and mention this to their managers. Yes this means that you can now have a COBOL web application and get away from those boring old console applications.
If you have never seen COBOL before, the program above is a very basic one, being the Hello World application. Note that COBOL has four divisions starting with the IDENTIFICATION DIVISION which is where you specify the program’s name or ID. The ENVIRONMENT DIVISION and CONFIGURATION SECTION is where you give configuration information about the compiler and computer where the code is compiling and executing.
The DATA DIVISION is where all your data structures would be defined in a more complex program. It is where you would list each table and data elements including their types. Almost like a data class. PIC S999V99 for example would be used to describe a two decimal floating point number and PIC X(20) a 20-character string.
Finally the PROCEDURE DIVISION and the MAIN section is where you write your code. In the example above this is just displaying “Hello World” at a precise location on a page or screen.
COBOL was designed to be easily readable and structured. You can see the data definitions, the variables are typed. The code is structured and uses English-like instructions. Some people have complained that COBOL is verbose and that it takes lots of lines to get the results required.
If you are a new programmer you probably do not want to get into COBOL these days, though it does pay well as the older programmers retire. If you have some past COBOL experience then getting into COBOL .NET should be easier. There is an old joke that there actually is one original COBOL program, and it has only been copied and modified millions of times.
Compare this to modern languages where we are typically told that the only way to modify legacy code is to rewrite it i.e. write once and write once again, or to write once and then throw away. This is another way of saying that COBOL is fairly simple to do once you get used to it and it rarely changes.
So there is a little bit of past and present history for you to consider.
Email: jclhein@gmail.com
