
Release of GnuCOBOL 2.2 - rbanffy
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2017-09/msg00003.html
======
guessmyname
Does anyone knows a job board for people interested to work with COBOL?

I have been interested in this language for quite some time, moved to a
different country just to try to find a job where I could learn more about it
and build up a career, unfortunately the city that I chose doesn't seems to be
have many offers. Most of the jobs require several years of experience doing
low level programming, and although I work with system programming languages
(C++, Go) I don't have relevant experience working with COBOL which seems to
be killing my opportunities.

It's like the chicken or the egg causality dilemma, I want a COBOL job but
everyone requires someone with relevant experience, but how can I get
experience if no one hires me to work with COBOL? LOL — I am willing to take a
junior-intermediate position if necessary, if anyone has a suggestion (company
names, job boards, etc).

Thank you in advance.

EDIT: I am in Vancouver, BC, Canada if anyone is interested.

~~~
the_af
> _I have been interested in this language for quite some time_

Out of curiosity: do you mean you find the job prospects interesting, or the
language itself? Because I'd understand if it's a money thing, but... I used
to work with COBOL and I wouldn't wish the language on anyone.

~~~
flavio81
> I used to work with COBOL and I wouldn't wish the language on anyone.

There are worse things. I'd rather work on Cobol than in PHP4, or in a project
where I have to deal with front-end stuff done using JS and back-end stuff
that relies on the NPM package ecosystem.

~~~
wglb
I vowed to never work in COBOL. Then, a consulting gig in RPG III convinced me
otherwise.

------
rbanffy
For those who miss the 3270 terminals, I made this:

[https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font](https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font)

Won't turn your keyboard into a beam-spring one, but it still feels cool.

~~~
cat199
Nice!

Not really cobol/ibm related, but to chime in on the retro term theme there is
also the GlassTTY font similarly extracted from a dec VT.

My vintage large font green/amber terminal emulator settings for when I'm
feeling lazy shall now grow even further :)

~~~
bitwize
The fake scanlines on that font make it look like ass unless you scale it to
an integer multiple of 20 pixels.

There's a vectorized version of the VT220 font called DEC Terminal Modern
which looks pretty good with arbitrary scaling factors.

Oh, and the X11 color "goldenrod" (#daa520) looks pretty close to the amber of
amber-phosphor CRTs. :)

------
flavio81
> _" After almost 7 years of continual improvement and refinements since
> OpenCOBOL version 1.1 and 3 years after the release of GnuCOBOL 1.1, the
> GnuCOBOL team is proud to announce the formal release of GnuCOBOL 2.2."_

They took 7 years to go up to GnuCobol 2.2; congratulations for this task. My
congratulations are sincere; COBOL compilers are very expensive (MicroFocus,
anyone?), so it is great to have a GNU compiler.

------
valarauca1
GnuCOBOL also has the single most comprehensive FAQ in existence. Their docs
are amazing. I haven't worked with the tool directly but its helped me solve
problem in other languages.

FAQ: [https://open-cobol.sourceforge.io/faq/](https://open-
cobol.sourceforge.io/faq/)

------
blitzdev
To those who are curious - Most of the COBOL jobs would be on the Enterprise
side. Banks , Insurance , Retails , Automobile , Airlines , Utility Companies
, US Government , etc. Mainly hosted on Mainframes

It's not for everybody. You cant do all those cool shit (compared to modern
languages and tech stacks) - it has its own stack. One of the main barrier to
entry is access to a Mainframe. Sure there are emulators , but nothing beats
playing around with the real thing. If IBM really wanted to secure talent ,
they should really address this. People are willing to pay for access as long
as it doesnt burn a hole in one's pocket.

~~~
j_s
Pub400: free *PGMR user profile on IBM i 7.3 mainframe

[http://pub400.com/](http://pub400.com/)

~~~
snaky
IBM i never were mainframes. Being it called IBM i Series, AS/400, or
System/38, it were midrange computer systems.

------
le-mark
I was always a bit mystified by the opencobol -> gnucobol transition. I
vaguely recall reading something about for profit, third parties not playing
nice and extending opencobol and then not opening their code or contributing
back to opencobol. And opencobol's move to gnu was in part a way to get more
muscle for license enforcement. Does anyone reading have more information on
that situation? Did I imagine it?

~~~
masom
That is mostly what happened. Some French company wouldn't play nice.

------
systems
is there a gallery of applications make with gnucobol .. i would like to see
how application made in gnucobol can look like

~~~
hasbot
A quick search for COBOL applications on GitHub found this:
[https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair](https://github.com/azac/cobol-
on-wheelchair).

~~~
systems
LOL .. well, are you sure this is meant to be taken seriously

from the project homepage

"Is it safe?

Of course not! I hacked this together over one night, and without any real
knowledge of the language. I suppose the code is utterly horrible."

~~~
insulanian
How could you resist running "./downhill.sh"!

------
jancsika
Why is Gnu hosting this on Sourceforge?

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/05/sourc...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-
in-bundle-pushing-adware/)

Also, their ftp link at the bottom of the message is broken.

~~~
munificent
Honestly, can you think of a more appropriate platform to host a _COBOL_
compiler? Google Code maybe? A Gopher site somewhere? Telnet into a BBS to
download it?

~~~
tjr
A lot of GNU packages are on Savannah, but it's not required:

[https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Hosting.html](https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Hosting.html)

~~~
jancsika
Hm... are there any GNU repos currently hosted on github?

~~~
mhh__
AFAIK GNU foundation won't use github because its not totally free software.
github isn't open source.

~~~
mattl
[https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-
evaluation.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html)

------
Mister_Snuggles
I keep meaning to find the time to write something useful in COBOL. I've got a
few ideas on useful things that would be a good fit for COBOL, but I haven't
found the time to do so.

I mainly want to do this for the learning experience. New
languages/frameworks/etc are cool, but old ones are special in their own way
too.

~~~
TomMarius
Can you share some things where COBOL still shines today?

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
The obvious answer is banking - A quick search of jobs in Toronto tells me
that at least three of Canada's big five banks are running COBOL. It wouldn't
surprise me if the rest of the big five were as well, they just didn't have
any jobs on the first page of listings.

Whether it shines or not in comparison to more modern languages is another
matter.

~~~
TomMarius
I thought COBOL is being used because of legacy code and technology, not
because it's the best option, and new code is written in Java?

~~~
oblio
That's true for the banks that I know of (European ones).

The new stack is sometimes .NET, but it's the same principle you mentioned.

------
dingdingdang
For download: [https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/files/gnu-
cobol/...](https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/files/gnu-cobol/2.0/)
(2.2 is top latest release link)

------
dragonwriter
So, 2.2 is out, but the latest docs are tagged as for 2.1 with a note that
that was a premature label and 2.1 doesn't actually exist...

[https://open-cobol.sourceforge.io](https://open-cobol.sourceforge.io)

------
zoom6628
Disclosure: Starte career as a COBOL programmer for NCR in 1982.

COBOL is a great language for its intended purpose. As it C, python, Lisp,
.....name any language in top 50 on TIOBE index.... These days i think of it
as a DSL for business transactions.

To those people having a hard time getting a job the biggest hurdles are in
the runtime environments. COBOL is so simple you can learn it in a weekend
assuming you know programming basics and concepts well. However....runtimes
are a different thing. What the hirers are trying to find is people with
knowledge in VRx, CICS, JCS and various other obtuse and arcane environments
for running COBOL programs and no books are going to give you that. My
observation is that why people with no experience in the language get turned
away.

However if you do want to use the language it was one of the very first to
embrace the concept of transactions and using queues as an ESB for load
balancing and true modular, scalable systems. Modular COBOL systems read next
item on the que to which they subscribe, get the message content, and then
process it, and putting an output message onto another queue. I remember
working with a retail system in NZ in mid 80s and it was doing millions of
transactions per hour, using tape reels for and those old washing machine disk
drives. So called "modern" tools and architectures struggle with such loads.
There are banks, airline systems, finance systems the world over that were
built with this stuff, and its still running not just because it works, but
because nothing better (when one looks holistically at the system) has come
along. Mentions in HN, loads of stars on github do not a failsafe financial
system make.

i code in python for own projects and c# at work(Im a product manager so im
dabbling not full-tilt product dev) and frequently groan at how modern
languages make simple things so hard. Yes I knows its a function of
environment but sorry, I was programming systems in early 80s that did more,
were more reliable, stored data safely on devices that now look only
marginally better than stone tablets, and they worked. Business got done.

Also bemoan my loss of productivity as i got sucked into the change-compile-
rinse-repeat mentality that pc brought to the world. In old days i could get
1000 line and up COBOl programs working from scratch(no templates, no COPY)
within 4 compiles and couple of days max, just by paying attention to what and
how i wrote the code.

End of rant.

Im a huge fan of COBOL, Pascal, C#, Python, javascript, Perl, PHP when used
for the right things. I have even been known to write some VB when it was the
right tool for the job.

Last comment - best wishes with your job hunt. As other posters have
suggested, look as far afield as you need to, be brave, take a plunge, and
make sure you know your fundamentals so that if COBOL doesnt work for you, you
can switch to another 'dialect' of computing and try again.

~~~
CaptainZapp
Late 80s, I started professionally on Unisys 1100 systems and ohmygod. The
runtime environment was such a disaster. Like half a days work to set up a
runstream to compile your damn program. The printout, which you could pick up
45 minutes later at the central printer. It was not all bad: You _really_
worked hard on avoiding syntax errors, before sending your code off for
compilation.

It was also strongly advisable not to forget your (if I emember correctly
uppercase, up to 8 characters and numbers) file names. Hierarchical directory
structures? That's probably for Sissies.

Anyway, when I moved to VAX/VMS and after writing my first program I asked a
colleague.

"So, how do I comile that?"

"Well, you type:"

cobol $program (or COBOL $PROGRAM, VMS is case agnostic)

I thought he was making fun of me after the Unisys experience, but nope. That
was it. (Ok, you then had to link it, which wasn't really more complicated).

To this day I think VMS is the best OS I have ever worked with.

Ahh, you bring back so many great and not so great memories... :)

