
Ask HN: Can you pick up COBOL and get a job doing it - jamesmp98
Because I thought the jobs were more about the Mainframe tech behind it (CICS, JCL, etc...)<p>Sp how can any developer wanting to make those big $$$ but lacking a mainframe get into COBOL?
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cr0sh
Make sure you really want to do this, before you do it...

It's one thing to learn COBOL as a hobby, but as someone who has been inside a
COBOL shop (actually, the language was DB/C - which is a variant of COBOL, but
close enough), and implemented a (very, very simple) web server in it (and
during a "training" period at this company - I also made a breakout clone -
let's just say it is possible, but barely playable) - you might not want to do
this full time.

Seriously - some of the stuff I saw (and this was over a decade ago) made you
want to scream. Maybe things have changed somewhat (I will give the company I
worked for credit in one area: GO TO was verboten in all but one situation,
which had to do with error trapping logic), but you'll still have to deal with
all that old code (some of which may be older than you are!). There's a reason
no one wants to touch it, and why not much "new blood" is looking to get
involved with it.

That said, newer versions/variants of COBOL have added OOP features and
whatnot, plus there are a few other fun areas (DB/C actually had a Java-based
VM for it when I last worked at that company, which allowed for some
interesting things to be done - one of which was a SQL-like ODBC bridge to the
flat-file "database", so you could query it).

I'm not sure whether you'd be able to make big $$$ as a newbie, though. That
money typically (I would expect) is reserved for old guys who did it for
years, and are fixing critical areas on-demand in a consulting/contract gig.

I gave the idea of doing COBOL back then about 30 seconds of thought, and
decided it wasn't worth the pain or potential pigeonholing. Between COBOL and
EDI - I'm not sure which is worse (and a combo between them - ugh, shudder).

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beamatronic
Surely there's a free implementation of COBOL around?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCOBOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCOBOL)

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jamesmp98
Of course, but there are no free Mainframes around.

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kjs3
Au contraire: [http://www.hercules-390.org/](http://www.hercules-390.org/) or
[http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/education/master-the-
mainfra...](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/education/master-the-mainframe/).

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kjs3
It's pretty tough to get a programming job in _any_ language if you don't
understand the underlying environment. You're not going to be particularly
attractive as a C/Unix programmer if you don't know 'make', the shell, IPC,
etc. That said, getting COBOL talent is hard enough that there are shops that
will train you up on it which might make more sense than trying to self-teach.

