Agreed; the entire hysteria over the loss of mainframe and COBOL skills is a red herring. The notion that there is a shortage of COBOL skills is especially silly. The real problem is that these government agencies (and many businesses) have done a bad job of managing and maintaining their legacy systems. Its a simple thing to find or train someone in COBOL - but try to teach them the business domain or the knowledge of how these huge legacy systems work - that is the real issue. As programmers with 40 years of experience on these systems retire or are "downsized", does anyone believe that COBOL skills are the real loss? Please...its much easier for them to blame their problems on COBOL than to admit that they have done a crappy job managing their legacy assets. At each step in maintenance it is always easier to hack something together rather than to clean things up with new changes and requirements, but eventually there is a price to pay.
Kirk Wolf Dovetailed Technologies On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:37 AM, McKown, John <john.mck...@healthmarkets.com> wrote: > Easy solution. Declare COBOL a national treasure and force all Universities > in Canada to teach it as a prerequisite to any other Computer Science class. > Or at least as a graduation requirement for a Bachelor's degree in CS. That's > "the government way". Just pass a law. I mean, I had to take classes that I > didn't like in order to get my B.Sc. in Math. (like English and History), Why > not require COBOL? It's no more arbitrary than anything else that nobody > wants to take. And there are PC based COBOL compilers (at least for Windows). > DMSII doesn't ring a bell, but according to Wikipedia: <quote>DMSII provided: > an ISAM model for data access, transaction isolation and database recovery > capabilities.</quote> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_DMSII . So all that > is needed is another database system which has the same API to replace it. > > -- > John McKown > Systems Engineer IV > IT > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
