
Mainframe on the Macbook - mbellotti
https://medium.com/@bellmar/mainframe-on-the-macbook-51bc1806d869
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le-mark
_But to be fair this doesn’t really install COBOL on your computer. GnuCOBOL
is a transpiler that parses COBOL and converts it to C before compiling it.
This feels a bit like cheating._

This is curious statement, what is cheating about it? I suppose this person
equates Cobol with mainframes, and wants the Real Experience. Hopefully the
author doesn't go down the rat hole of setting up Hercules with a 1970's era
version of MVS operating system, and tries to learn enough JCL to execute the
compiler. That's truly a waste of time.

Besides, not all machines that ran Cobol were EBCDIC, there were (are) a lot
of ASCII machines, including anything running GnuCobol. The key thing you're
learning about with Cobol is fixed length files, and storage formats like
Display, Zoned Decimal, Packed, and Binary.

Otherwise the article has some good links and solid history.

I personally think Cobol and the mainframe model of resource sandboxing has
some things to teach us today, but few are interested.

~~~
DrScump
JCL isn't scary. Think environment variables plus shell scripting.

In the mainframe environment where I started my career, OS JCL was sort of
viewed as a black art by most of the programmers (plus an annoyance, as
production JCL had to be initially submitted on cards).

I came from the system side, so I was happy to take over all the JCL issues
for my group. I'd set it up how I wanted in a flat file on TSO, spool it to
the JES2-connected card punch, and bingo! That also let me comment the non-
intuitive elements for the computing center folks, minimizing 3AM call-ins
when feeding-system issues made us improvise input checks. Literally nobody
had thought of doing production JCL that way before I did.

~~~
le-mark
_JCL isn 't scary. Think environment variables plus shell scripting._

I wager you didn't see it abused. I actually hold ignoble honor of reverse
engineering and implementing a complete JCL parser, validated on a million
line batch system. The most egregious thing I saw there was; there were a set
of jobs that essentially processed tree data structures as flatfiles, by
building flat files of sub trees and resubmitting themselves. I really lol'd
when I saw that.

~~~
DrScump
Somebody had an _IEBGENER_ fetish, maybe?

Speaking of ugly JCL, it was typical of my environment for production jobs to
not bother with cosmetics and comments since changing anything was a manual
process requiring either sitting at the keypunch or writing it out in
character grid boxes for keypunch operators. This made meaningful comments
rare and (when present) hard to find or read. When I redid all our jobs' JCL
via ISPF, I could not only easily reformat it all for readability and clarity,
but I described all the passable parameter switch options right in the JCL
right in context.

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marpstar
> Despite the fact that virtually no one learns COBOL anymore

Is this true? I mean, I know coding boot camp programs aren't emphasizing in
COBOL, but I graduated from University of Wisconsin-Platteville in 2010 and
was _required_ to take a COBOL class. I asked our intern this year (also from
UWP) and he confirmed that it's still a required course.

I did my first internship building an operations management system for auto
dealerships using AcuCOBOL. Using COBOL, particularly when binding to a GUI,
was painful.

edit: missed "aren't" in my second sentence.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I find it very odd that any CS program in the USA teaches COBOL. I would guess
this very unique to your program and it isn’t common.

India might have more COBOL courses since they specialized in it during the
90s (paid off during Y2K), but 20 years on even there I’m doubtful.

~~~
reaperducer
From April 2018:

 _Companies involved in keeping COBOL-based systems working say that 95
percent of ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs, 80 percent of in-
person transactions rely on them, and over 40 percent of banks still use COBOL
as the foundation of their systems. “Our COBOL business is bigger than it has
ever been,” said Chris Livesey, senior vice president and general manager at
Micro Focus, a company that offers modern COBOL coding and development
frameworks._

Source: [https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-
wa...](https://increment.com/programming-languages/cobol-all-the-way-down/)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Sure, but that says nothing about university-leve education.

~~~
reaperducer
Seriously? If you don't see the connection between learning a skill and job
demand for that skill, then you don't deserve to be in college.

~~~
derefr
The whole point here is that there's no inherent connection, and so the
economy can get into a weird state where COBOL programmers are being paid high
six-figure salaries simply because there are too few of them; and yet
universities aren't bothering to run COBOL courses, perhaps having executed
market research and found that nobody would actually _take_ such courses.

This is true, as well, of FORTRAN programmers, by the by, and has been for the
last two decades.

Personally, I think the supply isn't there for reasons both a bit like the
lack of supply of sewage engineers, and like the lack of supply of IT workers
for the porn "vertical": like sewage, COBOL-using employers are a job
environment nobody wants (e.g. stodgy old banks that don't like change); and
like porn, COBOL-using employers don't look good on a CV.

------
lokedhs
I've been playing with GNU COBOL for fun, and while it implements a lot of the
language, it lacks integration with external systems.

For example, you'd expect there to be a simple way to open a network
connection. I mean, doing REST calls is one of the fundamental ways you
communicate with other services these days. Well, GNU COBOL has no such
libraries.

Another thing COBOL is famous for is good SQL integration. As far as I
understand you have language-level integration with DB2 on the mainframes.
Doing the same on Linux with Postgres would be nice, but there is no database
integration at all. You're limited to flat files, whose names are hardcoded in
the source code.

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bobbydreamer
Only reason for cloud to be popular was IBM MAINFRAME is expensive. MIPS way
of billing is complexer. The way things are going cloud is a going expensive.
Blue metal still rocks.

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doggydogs94
I guess I will try out gnu cobol to see how well it functions. The test will
be how well it handles files.

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justherefortart
COBOL is terrible to work in. I was forced to take it in my MIS program in the
90s. We had the option of taking COBOL II or C Programming. Easiest choice I
ever made (C of course).

They touted how everyone would be able to get a job fixing Y2K bugs. All I
could imagine was a job like Peter Gibbons. I wanted to work in future
technologies, not those of yesteryear. Thank goodness the internet was taking
off by the mid 90s, so it was easy to see where things were going.

