It's Not About the Language

http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/

It is a very nice article.

On 2/1/2012 5:03 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
> http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/

My favorite quote from the reader comments:

"If truly 80ish% of the business world runs on COBOL, where are all the
programmers? I’ve never personally met one. How is all this code
maintained?"

A few years ago someone asked me what I did for a living. When I told
him I was a COBOL programmer, he was surprised. He thought everybody
had stopped using COBOL around 1990.

--
http://www.arnoldtrembley.com/

On Feb 2, 8:42*am, Arnold Trembley <arnold.tremb...@att.net> wrote:
> On 2/1/2012 5:03 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>
> >http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/
>
> My favorite quote from the reader comments:
>
> "If truly 80ish% of the business world runs on COBOL, where are all the
> programmers? I’ve never personally met one. How is all this code
> maintained?"
>
> A few years ago someone asked me what I did for a living. *When I told
> him I was a COBOL programmer, he was surprised. *He thought everybody
> had stopped using COBOL around 1990.
>
> --http://www.arnoldtrembley.com/

hat did he think the millennium fiasco was about?

On 2012-02-02, Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@att.net> wrote:
> On 2/1/2012 5:03 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>> http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/
>
> My favorite quote from the reader comments:
>
> "If truly 80ish% of the business world runs on COBOL, where are all the
> programmers? I’ve never personally met one. How is all this code
> maintained?"
>
> A few years ago someone asked me what I did for a living. When I told
> him I was a COBOL programmer, he was surprised. He thought everybody
> had stopped using COBOL around 1990.

I just meet one person around the age of 65 who was a cobol/pl1 programmer
and he told me to go the cobol way of programming as cobol developers are
always needed. But in the past years i've just seen just some very rare job
offers for cobol programmers around in my area. So where are all the
cobol programmers? Are they hidden in some basement room? )

Robert Doerfler wrote:
> On 2012-02-02, Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@att.net> wrote:
>> On 2/1/2012 5:03 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>>> http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/
>>
>> My favorite quote from the reader comments:
>>
>> "If truly 80ish% of the business world runs on COBOL, where are all
>> the programmers? I've never personally met one. How is all this code
>> maintained?"
>>
>> A few years ago someone asked me what I did for a living. When I
>> told him I was a COBOL programmer, he was surprised. He thought
>> everybody had stopped using COBOL around 1990.
>
> I just meet one person around the age of 65 who was a cobol/pl1
> programmer and he told me to go the cobol way of programming as cobol
> developers are always needed. But in the past years i've just seen
> just some very rare job offers for cobol programmers around in my
> area. So where are all the
> cobol programmers? Are they hidden in some basement room? )

It's an interesting question.

In its heyday there were COBOL programmers everywhere. Most of your
colleagues were COBOL guys, you went to User Groups and met other COBOL guys
from other sites, and it was quite usual to go for drinks with guys who
lived COBOL. There were Bulletin Boards dedicated to COBOL back in the days
of 2400 bps modems (before the Internet, but after PCs became available). By
the end of the 80s though the signs were starting to show. There were fewer
jobs being advertised (although nothing to get anxious about) and people
were talking about new fangled stuff like Objects and Classes that didn't
make much sense to COBOL guys. Languages like Java were dismissed as rubbish
because they weren't self-documenting and English-like... Throughout the 90s
COBOL continued to lose ground receiving some CPR for the Y2K problem, but
declining again after that.

So, what DID happen to all the COBOL guys?

Hard to say. I think some of them saw the writing on the wall and moved to
other things. Quite a few were "kicked upstairs" and became Team Leaders,
Business Analysts, and line managers, and some simply decided that they were
born to program and so they expanded their skill sets and avoided
redundancy.

As was noted in some of the comments on the OP's link, there are very few
COBOL programmers around who are under 30. (There was ONE guy who responded
who was 27 but he only knows COBOL, so his experience is limited.)

The ones who frequent this forum are largely the die-hards who are moving to
retirement (or have already) and they just love to think the Glory Days are
still with us. I see no harm in that and participate in it myself
occasionally. After 40 odd years I have as much "Glory" as anybody else :-)

There was a time here when we dealt with problems in COBOL and discussed
them, supporting Newbies and encouraging them to do their own homework...
:-) That hasn't happened for a very long time and the kind of questions we
get now are much more specialised and usually involve other things besides
COBOL. The decline in questions (and Newbies) is just one indication of the
decline in COBOL. If the language declines, then the number of people using
it will decline and that may account for the fact that COBOL guys are thin
on the ground.

The determined promotion of COBOL vendors helped to prolong the life of it
but even they are starting to realise it isn't going anywhere. IBM are not
investing large sums in COBOL to provide modern facilities for it, Micro
Focus have nailed their colours to the mast of Visual COBOL, which, although
it is an excellent product, I believe is doomed in the long run (say 3 or 4
years), and Fujitsu have already divested themselves of their COBOL product,
including their excellent NetCOBOL for .NET, which is doomed to share the
fate of MF's Visual COBOL.

(It really is sad to see two such excellent products that simply missed the
boat. As people using these products become more familiar and comfortable
with Objects and Layers, and start to realise that many of the precepts that
apply traditionally to COBOL are not relevant to Object COBOL or .Net or
Mono; when the penny drops that OBJECT code (encapsulated functionality) is
infinitely more important than SOURCE code, then they will start to wonder
why they are writing and maintaining thousands of lines of COBOL when they
could be using other languages that don't require that, and are provided
free. Pretty soon they move away from COBOL. (Whether you agree with this
reasoning or not, the fact is that both Micro Focus and IBM are looking to
diversify to other products than COBOL and Fujitsu has already left the
field.)

It is the stupid and misleading propaganda spread about by vested interest
companies like Gartner that "80% of the world's computing runs on COBOL"
that then causes people to ask where the programmers are. It's a very fair
question.

Another major factor that comes into this is that today's programmers are
generally better trained than we were and they have a grounding in Computer
Science (Principles and Practice of Programming, across paradigms, which we
never really had handed to us) These guys are capable of picking up COBOL
legacy and dealing with it until it can be replaced. They don't consider
themselves "COBOL Programmers" but they do consider themselves "computer
programmers" who are perfectly capable of dealing with most things. Their
Toolboxes are much fuller than ours were because the world they live in is
no place for "one trick ponies".

(I am currently working with one such person (there were two, but one of
them "completed" and got what she came for) who is doing Computer Science at
one of the leading NZ universities, and not being formally taught COBOL as
part of it. They both wanted to get some COBOL knowledge purely on their own
behalf, to improve their skill if they should be asked to deal with Legacy,
and one of them actually plans to make a living in the same niche market
where PRIMA is working: Moving legacy COBOL on and salvaging what it makes
sense to salvage.)

There are some time warp installations (particularly in the USA,
apparently...) where they still maintain fossilized COBOL core systems and
use the Waterfall to develop, just as they did in the last century. And
there are still some "one trick pony" COBOL codgers who ply their trade just
as they have always done. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is not a
place for young people who are trying to make a career. And it DOESN'T mean
that COBOL is alive and well and will be around for the next 50 years...

There are few people today who can claim to be a "COBOL programmer" and
fewer yet who would want to. (Putting COBOL experience on a CV these days
can actually lower your chances.) But for those of us, the increasngly
diminishing band who were there when commerce started using computers on a
grand scale, who learned the stuff by the seat of our pants and were driven
by our own passion for programming and curiosity, and then saw what we
learned become largely obsolete as the pace of technology increased
dramatically, we have nothing to be ashamed of.

I'm proud to be a "COBOL programmer" even though I have acquired many other
skills. I'll always have an affinity for COBOL; the simple beauty of it
reminds me of a simpler time when computing wasn't "Awesome", it was just
bread and butter...

Now, the notebook on my lap has many times the power of the machines I wrote
(non-Object) COBOL on. I string together components like Lego blocks and
build structures of grace and beauty with user interfaces that could only be
dreamed of in COBOL. I have learned new programming tricks, facilities and
techniques (functional Lambdas, LINQ, Reflection, Delegation, Regular
Expressions, to name just some...) that were never a part of my COBOL
world. My productivity has soared; my maintenance time has dived and I am a
happy developer... but I still remember when we did it line by line. :-)

"For the sin that ye do
by two and by two
ye must pay for
one by one."

(Kipling, "Tomlinson".)

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."

In article <slrnjin7vn.a9t.rodo@seeteufel.bloerp.de>,
Robert Doerfler <rodo@zlug.org> writes:
> On 2012-02-02, Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@att.net> wrote:
>> On 2/1/2012 5:03 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>>> http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/
>>
>> My favorite quote from the reader comments:
>>
>> "If truly 80ish% of the business world runs on COBOL, where are all the
>> programmers? I’ve never personally met one. How is all this code
>> maintained?"
>>
>> A few years ago someone asked me what I did for a living. When I told
>> him I was a COBOL programmer, he was surprised. He thought everybody
>> had stopped using COBOL around 1990.
>
> I just meet one person around the age of 65 who was a cobol/pl1 programmer
> and he told me to go the cobol way of programming as cobol developers are
> always needed. But in the past years i've just seen just some very rare job
> offers for cobol programmers around in my area. So where are all the
> cobol programmers? Are they hidden in some basement room? )

While the lack of IBM/CICS experience has kept me from getting back into
COBOL fulltime (that is where most of the work seems to be, and I can
easily find dozens if not hundreds of jobs) I am happy to say that as
of the end of this month I will be goign back to at least partial COBOL
programming for a living. The job required COBOL on IBM, but not on
a mainframe. I will be doing COBOL and AIX. A language and an environment
that meets my skillset perfectly.

If you really want a COBOL job, they are out there. I suspect the biggest
problem finding the jobs is that the places hiring know the market for
programmers is thin and tend to limit their searches to places where they
actually expect to find candidates (that means no Monster, Dice or local
newspapers!) or the are doing things like General Dynamics and setting
up internships in order to create their own.

Blame academia!! Even after repeatedly showing that the demand was there
and providing pointers to people who might be glad to have formal intern-
ship agreements (these can be used as a large selling point for an academic
program) I was unable to get people I was associated with to even consider
the possibility. Trying to drive the bus rather than meeting the needs
of the industry is going to come back to bite academia. Signs of this
are already showing up in the press.

bill

--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
billg999@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>

On 3 Feb 2012 08:51:03 GMT, Robert Doerfler <rodo@zlug.org> wrote:

>I just meet one person around the age of 65 who was a cobol/pl1 programmer
>and he told me to go the cobol way of programming as cobol developers are
>always needed. But in the past years i've just seen just some very rare job
>offers for cobol programmers around in my area. So where are all the
>cobol programmers? Are they hidden in some basement room? )

My workplace told us to retire.

--
"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found,
than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace
to the legislature, and not to the executive department."

- James Madison

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <slrnjin7vn.a9t.rodo@seeteufel.bloerp.de>,
> Robert Doerfler <rodo@zlug.org> writes:
>> On 2012-02-02, Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@att.net> wrote:
>>> On 2/1/2012 5:03 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>>>> http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/
>>>
>>> My favorite quote from the reader comments:
>>>
>>> "If truly 80ish% of the business world runs on COBOL, where are all
>>> the programmers? Iâ?Tve never personally met one. How is all this
>>> code maintained?"
>>>
>>> A few years ago someone asked me what I did for a living. When I
>>> told him I was a COBOL programmer, he was surprised. He thought
>>> everybody had stopped using COBOL around 1990.
>>
>> I just meet one person around the age of 65 who was a cobol/pl1
>> programmer and he told me to go the cobol way of programming as
>> cobol developers are always needed. But in the past years i've just
>> seen just some very rare job offers for cobol programmers around in
>> my area. So where are all the
>> cobol programmers? Are they hidden in some basement room? )
>
> While the lack of IBM/CICS experience has kept me from getting back
> into COBOL fulltime (that is where most of the work seems to be, and
> I can easily find dozens if not hundreds of jobs) I am happy to say
> that as
> of the end of this month I will be goign back to at least partial
> COBOL programming for a living. The job required COBOL on IBM, but
> not on
> a mainframe. I will be doing COBOL and AIX. A language and an
> environment that meets my skillset perfectly.
>
> If you really want a COBOL job, they are out there. I suspect the
> biggest problem finding the jobs is that the places hiring know the
> market for programmers is thin and tend to limit their searches to
> places where they actually expect to find candidates (that means no
> Monster, Dice or local newspapers!) or the are doing things like
> General Dynamics and setting
> up internships in order to create their own.
>
> Blame academia!! Even after repeatedly showing that the demand was
> there and providing pointers to people who might be glad to have
> formal intern- ship agreements (these can be used as a large selling
> point for an academic program) I was unable to get people I was
> associated with to even consider the possibility. Trying to drive
> the bus rather than meeting the needs
> of the industry is going to come back to bite academia. Signs of this
> are already showing up in the press.
>
> bill

I remember having exactly the same discussions with representatives of
"Acadaemia" back in the 1980s. We knew then that the people being produced
from Universities and Technical Institutes were not much use in the real
world and had to be trained into the world of Commerce.

Fortunately, most of them were bright young people who were capabale of
learning quickly, but industry generally felt it was being let down by
Acadaemia.

Nowadays, people who arrive with a Computer Science degree are generally
much better equipped that the people who arrived then and just because they
don't know COBOL does not mean that they are of no use.

I have enjoyed working with the "new breed" of IT graduate. They are more
open minded, less evangelical, and much more capable than generally used to
be the case.

I believe what is being churned out from Acadaemia now, is a far better and
more useful product, than what was being churned out through the 60s, 70s,
and 80s.

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."

SkippyPB wrote:
> On 3 Feb 2012 13:03:58 GMT, billg999@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon)
> wrote:
>
>> In article <slrnjin7vn.a9t.rodo@seeteufel.bloerp.de>,
>> Robert Doerfler <rodo@zlug.org> writes:
>>> On 2012-02-02, Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@att.net> wrote:
>>>> On 2/1/2012 5:03 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>>>>> http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/
>>>>
>>>> My favorite quote from the reader comments:
>>>>
>>>> "If truly 80ish% of the business world runs on COBOL, where are
>>>> all the programmers? Iâ?Tve never personally met one. How is all
>>>> this code maintained?"
>>>>
>>>> A few years ago someone asked me what I did for a living. When I
>>>> told him I was a COBOL programmer, he was surprised. He thought
>>>> everybody had stopped using COBOL around 1990.
>>>
>>> I just meet one person around the age of 65 who was a cobol/pl1
>>> programmer and he told me to go the cobol way of programming as
>>> cobol developers are always needed. But in the past years i've just
>>> seen just some very rare job offers for cobol programmers around in
>>> my area. So where are all the
>>> cobol programmers? Are they hidden in some basement room? )
>>
>> While the lack of IBM/CICS experience has kept me from getting back
>> into COBOL fulltime (that is where most of the work seems to be, and
>> I can easily find dozens if not hundreds of jobs) I am happy to say
>> that as
>> of the end of this month I will be goign back to at least partial
>> COBOL programming for a living. The job required COBOL on IBM, but
>> not on
>> a mainframe. I will be doing COBOL and AIX. A language and an
>> environment that meets my skillset perfectly.
>>
>> If you really want a COBOL job, they are out there. I suspect the
>> biggest problem finding the jobs is that the places hiring know the
>> market for programmers is thin and tend to limit their searches to
>> places where they actually expect to find candidates (that means no
>> Monster, Dice or local newspapers!) or the are doing things like
>> General Dynamics and setting
>> up internships in order to create their own.
>>
>> Blame academia!! Even after repeatedly showing that the demand was
>> there and providing pointers to people who might be glad to have
>> formal intern- ship agreements (these can be used as a large selling
>> point for an academic program) I was unable to get people I was
>> associated with to even consider the possibility. Trying to drive
>> the bus rather than meeting the needs
>> of the industry is going to come back to bite academia. Signs of
>> this
>> are already showing up in the press.
>>
>> bill
>
> My employer has nearly 30,000 employees. At least 25% of them are
> COBOL programmers. Most of us have been with the company (in one of
> its many forms) for 25 years or more. I suspect that at any company
> that has a large programming staff the same statistics would hold.
>
> What that means is that as us baby boomers start to retire, there will
> be more openings in COBOL. My employer, and I suspect others as well,
> are starting to panic. They look at how many COBOL programmers they
> are going to lose over the next 5-10 years, look at what they have as
> backfill and realize they are going to be woefully short.

So, the company has over 7000 people invested in COBOL and NOW they start to
worry?

They have two options:

1. Get more people. (Whatever it takes; training if necessary...)
2. Reduce dependency on COBOL.

They are going for option 1, but it would be foolish in the extreme not to
also use option 2. (Watch what happens as new managers come in...)

In fact, just focussing on EITHER of these options is not a good strategy,
for ANY COBOL dependent company.

Eventually, option 2 supersedes option 1, but I agree that it won't happen
this week... :-)

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."

Am 03.02.2012 09:51, schrieb Robert Doerfler:
> So where are all the
> cobol programmers? Are they hidden in some basement room?

they are on retirement or early retirement.

Sure, because there are still quite some legacy applications built in
COBOL out there, and the breed of COBOL programmers is dying out, there
might be a chance for old COBOL hacks like me to make some fast bucks.
I'll attend a Micro Focus roadshow here in Frankfurt on February 12;
maybe I can learn something, make some contacts, maybe even meet
somebody from the participants in this forum?

But nobody should think of building a life-long career on COBOL and
nothing but COBOL.


Cheers,
L.W.

On Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:48:02 +0100, Lüko Willms
<lueko.willms@domain.invalid> wrote:

> they are on retirement or early retirement.
>
> Sure, because there are still quite some legacy applications built in
>COBOL out there, and the breed of COBOL programmers is dying out, there
>might be a chance for old COBOL hacks like me to make some fast bucks.
>I'll attend a Micro Focus roadshow here in Frankfurt on February 12;
>maybe I can learn something, make some contacts, maybe even meet
>somebody from the participants in this forum?
>
> But nobody should think of building a life-long career on COBOL and
>nothing but COBOL.

As one of those retired CoBOL programmers - we were predominately
CoBOL, but never "nothing but CoBOL".

--
"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found,
than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace
to the legislature, and not to the executive department."

- James Madison

> * But nobody should think of building a life-long career on COBOL and
> nothing but COBOL.
>
> As one of those retired CoBOL programmers - we were predominately
> CoBOL, but never "nothing but CoBOL".
>

Very well mentioned. It's all mixed-up PLs right now.

Experienced Cobol programmers are up to their late 40s, and are
thinking of "early" retirement. Nothing fancy here, but most of these
guys are rich (working with Cobol) and can afford to retire (in the
Philippines). Unexpectedly, to my surprise... some companies are
training their "new" programmers Cobol! Blame academia?!? Maybe, they
opted to teach students opensource (free) coding because it is costly
teaching them Cobol (compilers fee is soaring).

Cobol functionality is a fact. Thats why we are Cobol programmers
ourselves... but most of us unfortunately hate Cobol (I knew Pete is
one) because of the compiler cost. For me, mix the Cobol up with
opensource technologies and you will get more functionalities. Cost
effectiveness of PLs (especially Cobol) does not depend on the IDEs
itself but on business operations upfront.

SkippyPB wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Feb 2012 12:44:06 +1300, "Pete Dashwood"
> <dashwood@removethis.enternet.co.nz> wrote:
>
>> SkippyPB wrote:
>>> On 3 Feb 2012 13:03:58 GMT, billg999@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon)
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> In article <slrnjin7vn.a9t.rodo@seeteufel.bloerp.de>,
>>>> Robert Doerfler <rodo@zlug.org> writes:
>>>>> On 2012-02-02, Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@att.net> wrote:
>>>>>> On 2/1/2012 5:03 PM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
>>>>>>> http://www.gonzobanker.com/2012/01/c...bout-language/
>>>>>>
>>>>>> My favorite quote from the reader comments:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "If truly 80ish% of the business world runs on COBOL, where are
>>>>>> all the programmers? Iâ?Tve never personally met one. How is all
>>>>>> this code maintained?"
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A few years ago someone asked me what I did for a living. When I
>>>>>> told him I was a COBOL programmer, he was surprised. He thought
>>>>>> everybody had stopped using COBOL around 1990.
>>>>>
>>>>> I just meet one person around the age of 65 who was a cobol/pl1
>>>>> programmer and he told me to go the cobol way of programming as
>>>>> cobol developers are always needed. But in the past years i've
>>>>> just seen just some very rare job offers for cobol programmers
>>>>> around in my area. So where are all the
>>>>> cobol programmers? Are they hidden in some basement room? )
>>>>
>>>> While the lack of IBM/CICS experience has kept me from getting back
>>>> into COBOL fulltime (that is where most of the work seems to be,
>>>> and I can easily find dozens if not hundreds of jobs) I am happy
>>>> to say that as
>>>> of the end of this month I will be goign back to at least partial
>>>> COBOL programming for a living. The job required COBOL on IBM, but
>>>> not on
>>>> a mainframe. I will be doing COBOL and AIX. A language and an
>>>> environment that meets my skillset perfectly.
>>>>
>>>> If you really want a COBOL job, they are out there. I suspect the
>>>> biggest problem finding the jobs is that the places hiring know the
>>>> market for programmers is thin and tend to limit their searches to
>>>> places where they actually expect to find candidates (that means no
>>>> Monster, Dice or local newspapers!) or the are doing things like
>>>> General Dynamics and setting
>>>> up internships in order to create their own.
>>>>
>>>> Blame academia!! Even after repeatedly showing that the demand was
>>>> there and providing pointers to people who might be glad to have
>>>> formal intern- ship agreements (these can be used as a large
>>>> selling point for an academic program) I was unable to get people
>>>> I was associated with to even consider the possibility. Trying to
>>>> drive the bus rather than meeting the needs
>>>> of the industry is going to come back to bite academia. Signs of
>>>> this
>>>> are already showing up in the press.
>>>>
>>>> bill
>>>
>>> My employer has nearly 30,000 employees. At least 25% of them are
>>> COBOL programmers. Most of us have been with the company (in one of
>>> its many forms) for 25 years or more. I suspect that at any company
>>> that has a large programming staff the same statistics would hold.
>>>
>>> What that means is that as us baby boomers start to retire, there
>>> will be more openings in COBOL. My employer, and I suspect others
>>> as well, are starting to panic. They look at how many COBOL
>>> programmers they are going to lose over the next 5-10 years, look
>>> at what they have as backfill and realize they are going to be
>>> woefully short.
>>
>> So, the company has over 7000 people invested in COBOL and NOW they
>> start to worry?
>>
>> They have two options:
>>
>> 1. Get more people. (Whatever it takes; training if necessary...)
>> 2. Reduce dependency on COBOL.
>>
>> They are going for option 1, but it would be foolish in the extreme
>> not to also use option 2. (Watch what happens as new managers come
>> in...)
>>
>> In fact, just focussing on EITHER of these options is not a good
>> strategy, for ANY COBOL dependent company.
>>
>> Eventually, option 2 supersedes option 1, but I agree that it won't
>> happen this week... :-)
>>
>> Pete.
>
> It really isn't like they JUST started to panic. The senior
> management, like that of many other software companies, bought into
> the soup du jour language myth and thought COBOL would just fade away.

Perception.

> Instead, they are finding that our clients, while supplementing their
> "big iron" applications with server based technologies, are not
> willing to give up the superior file handling and speed that is
> critical in their businesses that mainframe gives them.

Perception. While you may believe it, there is no basis in reality for
thinking that mainframes are faster or more reliable than server networks.
(They were for a while, but technology evolves.) The Internet evolved from a
network that was invented to provide reliability in the event of nuclear
attack... But, at the end of the day it comes down to perception. If you and
your clients believe it, then it is true for you.

> In addition,
> the regulatory changes that come down the pike every month or so are
> far easier to implement in our COBOL code than in the JAVA or whatever
> else we happen to be running on the server side of the house.

Perception. Ask the Java guys if it is easier in COBOL... :-)


> Hence,
> we continue to develop and maintain legacy and new COBOL code. We do
> offer server based systems and support them as well but the number of
> clients is small and so is the revenue. I'm not sure what language
> they use.
>
> Option 2 is no option at all in our world and won't be a very long
> time.

We'll see... :-)

(Let's dicuss this again in 5 years...)

My point here, Steve, is that the premises for the discussion are based on
perception, and not on independent fact. It doesn't matter, most people buy
stuff based on their perception of it and there is a huge industry based in
Madison Avenue which is designed to change our perception of products and
services, in an effort to make us buy them.

At the moment in your company you have managers who have been there a long
time, you have a solid core of COBOL people (whose perception is often
limited to "the COBOL way" (and while that may be fine in some cases it is
not always the BEST way...))

But,as I'm sure you are aware, the world and companies do not stand still.
New people come in and their experience is different. They perceive things
differently and are not necessarily satisfied with the status quo. They ask
questions, they know about other ways to do things, and they eventually
become managers. The same thing happens at the Clients. Change is actually
inevitable UNLESS you can show independently and unemotionally, that the
current service is the best available for the price. You use COBOL because
it works for you and provides the services you sell, at a good price, not
because you have 7000 COBOL programmers. :-) It may well be, that in your
company, COBOL is a good model. Perhaps the underlying services don't change
a lot or amendments are trivial in the scheme of things. Everything ticks
over nicely just as it has for many years and there is a core of code that
the business is based on and which nobody really wants to meddle with. There
is therefore no push to change things.. If that is the case then it may
indeed be some time before change is implemented.

But, eventually, it will be.

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."

Am 04.02.2012 23:29, schrieb Pete Dashwood:
> The Internet evolved from a
> network that was invented to provide reliability in the event of nuclear
> attack...

Myth.


Cheers,
L.W.