"Nor is the watchdog happy about the tax agency’s continued use of
COBOL, which they note,
could lead to 'difficulty finding employees with such knowledge,' adding
that this
'shortage of expert personnel available to maintain a critical system
creates significant risk to an agency’s mission.'"
I'm not a COBOLer, but this is ignorance on part of the GAO as they
listen to popular marketeering from a number of voices in our industry.
COBOL is *not* a dead language. Dr. Cameron Seay has been teaching COBOL
to his students in Tennessee and Carolina for years, rewarding their
academic efforts with high paying jobs and a fair amount of renown.
To confirm the viability of COBOL, I ran a quick compile, link, and
execute this morning. This was on PC hardware running Linux and was done
via shell script rather than JCL. COBOL is not only alive and well but
works great on non-mainframe systems.
The most reliable code is code which you don't have to modify. Salesmen
calling for replacement of COBOL simply because of its age are trying to
sell you something. Beware their snake oil. Working COBOL is far better
than untested (even as yet unwritten) Java, or even C or Python.
Ditching COBOL because of its age as a language is illogical. It's
another gubmint mandate likely to ramp-up costs on the overburdened US
taxpayers but fail to deliver on promises.
A smarter direction is to ensure currency of supporting systems and then
integrate with the newfangled shiny things. Hopefully the IBM contract
will help the GAO see the light.
-- R; <><
On 8/28/23 18:48, Mike Schwab wrote:
https://planetmainframe.com/2023/08/mandates-and-talent-shortages-are-driving-big-spending-on-modernization/
IBM is one contractor.
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