Cobol Programming by MK Roy. 5 reasons to learn mainframe programming ... You may have to modify a bit of Cobol application logic. The problem is the language is COBOL. Although Cobol is a very old language it is true that very large companies still have "legacy" code that still needs maintaining and in some cases, upgrading. Although Cobol is a very old language it is true that very large companies still have "legacy" code that still needs maintaining and in some cases, upgrading.

The only use cases are those that exist because of poor management or fear of new technologies. AFAIK there are still no viruses on MVS & VM systems. Should I learn COBOL or OpenGL?

The time I spend learning COBOL was an active detriment to my career. Programmers should learn Hexadecimal and Binary (machine level code) and then go into application layer programming from there, but that is neither cool or trendy. Check COBOL community's reviews & … COBOL is no longer a language the vast majority of new (or experienced) programmers choose to learn, but there are certainly still a lot of older coders around who used to work with it. Quote: >Folks, >I understand that there is a large amount of maintenance work to >be done in COBOL. In other words, there’s really no need to learn COBOL, but there’s probably some company, somewhere that desperately needs younger programmers to learn it, as a … It would let you write Cobol using an eclipse based environment that would be similar to what you would use for a mainframe (Rational Developer for Z). Admittedly, he’s biased. Should I Learn COBOL?

Paradoxically, it was the fact that newer languages were emerging — such as Fortran & Co. — that cemented the legacy of COBOL. Arunn Ramadoss thinks you should learn COBOL. Prerequisites. He’s the program manager of Micro Focus, a company that sells modernization tools for COBOL (see our previous coverage here). Free course or paid. By 1970, there was hardly a system that was not written in COBOL. Even if you learn COBOL you will never be able to learn the spaghetti code they made in the 60s to power the transactions that people still care about today. Tutorials for beginners or advanced learners. There was even a tombstone for COBOL before the language was even completed. Learning COBOL will probably be easier for folks who have some experience with languages that are compiled and statically typed, and who have a basic understanding of what pointers are. They have a free demo version and a cheap student version IIRC. The business-computer-language was proclaimed dead in the eighties, and the trend went so fast that new programmers didn’t even bother learning it. Admittedly, he’s biased. I would say, “I see it the way that an English scholar would see Latin.” It’s a useful thing to know, and this is why I’m going to suggest, because it’s CodeNewbie, I would suggest that people do learn COBOL. Check out these best online COBOL courses and tutorials recommended by the programming community. Many large enterprises still use COBOL somewhere in their systems for accounting software for example and with the number of COBOL programmers around today they are paying top dollar for their services.