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Comment by arvidkahl | Hacker News Reader

Redhat's "Command Line Heroes" podcast has a very insightful episode about COBOL and Go, talking about legacy languages, and how all languages may or may not become legacy, and their impact on new paradigms like the web (and vice versa).

https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-3/the-i...

My takeaway is that particularly with COBOL, there is a vested interest in the finance industry to find and retain COBOL talent, and making efforts to popularizing a language for the web is essentially a recruiting tactic more than anything else.

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Since COBOL usage seems to be heavily tied to high transaction volume mainframes (I'm deliberately ignoring the i Series here), which currently mean IBM zOS-based machines, a good approach would be to make zOS easily accessible to hobbyists and students. IBM has a couple products in their cloud that are running on Linux under zVM. It'd be great if I could bring up a small zOS VM and play with it the same way I can make a small x86 Linux VM on just about any cloud provider.

Oh... And the same applies to Linux on POWER (which is more accessible), AIX on POWER (which is less accessible) and Solaris or Linux on SPARC (Oracle could offer their machines on their public cloud).

There is a huge amount of coolness outside the x86 server space. We should ask for the companies who make it to create more onboarding routes for those machines, unless they want the market to think they are internally considered dead ends (I'm looking at you, Larry Ellison).

I wonder how the market for that is now, and how it will be a decade from now. I imagine a lot of the people with significant experience working with COBOL and mainframes are getting older and retiring

Eventually companies will pay people to get up to speed on older technology like RPG and COBOL. For sure, they are fighting it hard, but I don't see a lot of other options. It's harder for me to imagine all of this legacy software being replaced with new code.

It is substantially cheaper to train people and training people in COBOL is easy. Some businesses are starting to realize and even try to encourage IBM to do more to promote their products.

As another user said, allowing people to spin up z/OS would be awesome. As of now, it's not really practical to learn without direct access to mainframes. So all the cost is on the business to train devs. Which is not as important in other dev positions

I used to work in a medium sized college town in the midwest that basically had 4 places for software developers to work. The university, the "fun" software company (where I worked), and a couple insurance companies.

We hired a lot of people from the insurance companies and they all basically said that they would hire anyone with a science type degree that was willing to learn COBOL.

I actually know a bank with an office close to me that still recruits COBOL developers to maintain some of their old legacy systems, while they slowly transition to newer tech. These people get paid pretty well by the way.

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