Here are three more reasons to learn COBOL in the 2020s: PowerSystems, OpenVMS, and NonStop. But what about your needs, as a software engineer? Which segment is more likely to embrace new developer technologies for interacting with the host system? Which segment is more likely to adopt contemporary development practices such as those arising from Extreme Programming? Where will you find the more-interesting job opportunities with COBOL? Most articles on the subject focus on the needs of hiring companies – their old workforce is leaving, and they need new COBOL developers. You won’t enjoy working that way day in and day out. It isn’t necessary to work this way anymore – at least five IDE-based interfaces to System Z are already on the market – but a company that isn’t willing to invest in modernizing their systems will probably not support any of the newer IDE-based interfaces to the Z system. This interface supports a very basic text editor with none of the usual features or conveniences of modern IDEs. It means that in many such companies, you would have to use the traditional interface to the mainframe – a terminal-based, text-oriented interface called Time-Sharing Option (TSO) with a full-screen interface built on top of it, the Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF). In general – with the usual caveats about generalizations – larger enterprises are less open to change than smaller ones. It is not cost-effective for smaller companies. This platform is used only by the very largest enterprises. To connect a couple of dots for software engineers considering picking up COBOL skills: IBM Z has the greatest market share. Which programming language do you suppose people used to write most of their applications on midrange systems? You guessed it: COBOL. Companies have significant investment in and dependency on legacy systems, and the old systems are being modernized and cloud-enabled. Most of the media play centers on the big iron – IBM Z – but midrange systems are in the same position today with respect to legacy systems and virtualization, and with respect to the generation of people who have been supporting them going into retirement. To serve that market, a number of computer companies provided midrange computers. Historically – if I may use such a word for an industry less than a century old – the computing market has been segmented into more levels than just “micro” and “mainframe.” Mid-sized enterprises have long faced a dilemma: Use relatively inexpensive microcomputer equipment and systems that barely keep up with the company’s demand for computing power, or pay heavily for mainframe systems that have several times more capacity than the company will ever use. While IBM Z accounts for the majority of existing COBOL applications, the language is relevant to other platforms, as well. Recently, there’s been a lot of news about growth in opportunities for work in the COBOL language, owing to a resurgence of the IBM mainframe platform both to support mission-critical applications in key industries and to take advantage of IBM Z cloud computing capabilities.
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