Recently, Joseph Steinberg noted that the governor of New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to assist in updating or fixing business applications being used by the state for unemployment applications. I last wrote about this in June 2019 , after seeing an article about COBOL expertise being still in demand by financial institutions. I decided to look and see if there were any resources available for someone to get familiar with COBOL. It turns out that Micro Force is a company that has up-to-date COBOL development environments and compilers, OpenSource.com lists several compilers available (gnuCOBOL seems to be the significant one (documentation here)), and there is a beginning COBOL programming book available from Apress. Looks like there may be some opportunity here (at least according to Indeed.com ….).
Mentions
Webmentions
I recently came across this post which discussed adding COBOL to a function as a service (FAAS). It linked to several articles from 2020 that I also noticed back then. Here are some other COBOL resources mentioned in the post:
Open Mainframe Project – The Open Mainframe Project was founded in 2015, as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment.COBOL Programming Course – Created by IBM and contributed to the Open Mainframe ProjectFreeCodeCamp – Video that accompanies the course above (August 2020, 116K views – wow!) (1.5 hr)YouTube – How to practice COBOL programming (15 min)YouTube – Learn COBOL in One Video (2.5 hr)
@AndySylvester I think the IRS could also use some help with COBOL.
@Ron yes, I think that is another area that has lots of old COBOL applications. I have not done any programming in COBOL, but I knew a science teacher who was a programming buff who did Y2K COBOL consulting as a side job.
@AndySylvester We had COBOL as one of the two major programming languages in higher Ed as late as the early 90’s, and I know people got jobs programming in COBOL later, even after Y2K.
@odd interesting, thanks for the info