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from the portents-of-future-ecma-script dept.
The Enterprises Project writes about how the demand for several very specific, established skills, including COBOL, is increasing as boomers retire, taking their knowledge with them. Part of the skill gap between the old and the new is familiarity with the work flow and business processes.
Baby Boomers are retiring and taking with them the skills to run legacy technologies upon which organizations still (amazingly) rely – from AS/400 wrangling to COBOL development. That leaves many CIOs in a tight spot, trying to fill roles that not only require specialized knowledge no longer being taught but that most IT professionals agree also have limited long-term prospects. "Specific skill sets associated with mainframes, DB2 and Oracle, for example, are complex and require years of training, and can be challenging to find in young talent," says Graig Paglieri, president of Randstad Technologies.
Apparently, COBOL is still in use in 9 percent of businesses, mainly in finance and government. And so the demand for COBOL is gradually growing. If one has interest to pick up that plus one or more of the other legacy technologies, on top of something newer and trendier, there should be a possibility to clean up before the last of these jobs moves to India.
Earlier on SN:
Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 (2017)
Banks Should Let Ancient Programming Language COBOL Die (2017)
Honesty in Employment Ads (2016)
3 Open Source Projects for Modern COBOL Development
(2015)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:42PM
There are several arguments here really.
If you don't like GC, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. There are entire problem domains where that is in fact the proper view to have.
We could all just write in C. Or assembly language. Or hex codes even. Yes, really. We could. Even flip front panel switches.
So why don't we? Productivity. Because really what we're dancing around here is money.
If I need an extra 64 GB of ram and more cpu cores but can beat my C++ competitor to market by six months, my boss won't even blink when I ask. And laugh all the way to the bank. I am not optimizing for bytes and cpu cycles. I'm optimizing for dollars. That's probably why so many banks and financial institutions use Java.
Why do these high level languages exist, and why does GC exist?
I can manage memory just fine actually. I did that for years and years with Pascal in the 80's, and C and C++ in the 90's. But it is irrelevant. Managing memory doesn't help me actually solve the actual problems that my code is designed to solve. It is unnecessary bookkeeping.
We have these machines now called computers. They can take care of the unnecessary bookkeeping for us. Just like dishwashers can wash dishes for us.
My final argument is this. For the programming problems I routinely solve, it would probably be fairly easy to manage memory. It is allocated and released in fairly simple patterns.
Sometimes programs are very complex and do not have simple patterns of allocation and release. You begin to notice this in Lisp programs. GC was invented for a reason.
There is another famous quote that I won't bother to look up, but the gist is this . . . in any sufficiently complex C++ program is a bug ridden, poorly specified, suboptimal ad-hoc garbage collector.
I know how to take square roots by hand. (A child of the 70's) But I use a pocket calculator.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.