On 08/21/2014 03:19 PM, Paul Gilmartin wrote: > On Thu, 21 Aug 2014 13:16:33 -0500, Ed Gould wrote: > >> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9250527/ >> Meet_Cobol_s_hard_core_fans?source=CTWNLE_nlt_shark_2014-08-21 >> > > http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9250527/Meet_Cobol_s_hard_core_fans?source=CTWNLE_nlt_shark_2014-08-21 > >> Computerworld - With the long-anticipated Cobol skills shortage >> starting to bite, many businesses have been steadily migrating >> applications off the mainframe. Blue Cross Blue Shield of South >> Carolina has been doubling down. > Some 23 of the world's top 25 retailers, 92 of the top 100 banks, > and the 10 largest insurers all entrust core operations to Cobol > programs running on IBM mainframes, says Deon Newman, vice > president, IBM System z. Since 2010, around 50 to 75 customers > have left the mainframe fold, IBM says, while some 270 of IBM's > 3,500 mainframe customers have come aboard as new clients since > then, Newman says. > > I'm somewhat surprised to see an IBM employee publicly disclosing > such business statistics. > > -- gil
Since these statistics show a trend that goes counter to the common perception, it makes perfect business sense for IBM to make them public, assuming they wish the mainframe to continue to be a viable platform. I'm sure one of the arguments used by those who have a financial self-interest in moving workloads off mainframes is that those other platforms must be the only viable long-term strategy since everyone is moving workloads from, not to, mainframes and everyone else can't be wrong. If more customers are moving to mainframes than leaving, that destroys that argument. As for the coming critical shortage of COBOL programmers: I don't know how colleges train people in IT these days, but in the old days students were taught basic programming concepts and algorithms and exposed to many different programming languages in order to appreciate that no single programming language is optimal for all tasks. Once you understood programming concepts and were functionally literate in several languages, learning a new programming language was not that difficult: just read a language reference manual and an introductory text, learn how to map constructs and algorithms in known programming languages into the new language, learn what is unique about the language, and study existing programs. In a few days it was possible to write simple programs in the new language and certainly in at most a few months be competent enough to understand and potentiallly maintain programs in the language. Unless the new generation of programmers is much dumber than we were, I think the alarms about the future lack of COBOL programmers is overblown. Acquiring a new language skill is a better understood process and simpler than teaching complex application designs unique to one installation. It would certainly be better if younger programmers were brought on board and introduced to COBOL applications while some of the retiring COBOL programmers are still around, but that overlap is desireable just for passing on knowledge about installation programming conventions, complex application designs and inter-application relationships. If some IT-management types believe that this overlap requirement will just magically vanish or be significantly reduced if they migrate off COBOL to any of the existing alternatives or if they migrate to a different platform, they are in for a unpleasant surprise. -- Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
