Making Mainframes Cool Again

Information Week ^ | 4/15/2016 | Steve Trautman

[AdmSmith]

Mainframe systems are still the backbone of much of today's IT infrastructure. Yet, finding IT talent to maintain these systems, and the COBOL and Fortran languages that support them, is becoming increasingly difficult.

The trouble is that all of the people who know how to maintain these systems -- while preparing to bolt on next-gen apps -- are aging out of the workforce, and there are no Millennials eagerly lining up to take their spots. Mainframes require knowledge of COBOL and Fortran, languages that are not considered particularly sexy these days. It's not hard to see why no one wants to learn these languages. Mainframe is dead. Long live the cloud. Right?

[AdmSmith]

FORTRAN is still kicking. FORTRAN 15 will be released in 2018 http://j3-fortran.org/

[AdmSmith]

FORTRAN 15
June 2016 - Working draft available
July 2016 - WG5 straw ballot
February 2017- Committee draft available
March 2017 - WG5 ballot on committee draft
October 2017 - Draft International Standard available
November 2017 - Ballot on Draft International Standard
February 2018 - Final Draft International Standard available
April 2018 - Ballot on Final Draft International Standard
July 2018 - Standard published

https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2015/09/04/doctor-fortran-in-one-door-closes

[Smokin' Joe]

Wow. I haven’t messed with FORTRAN since ‘79. I hope the accursed punch cards are history...

[Gene Eric]

Intel is still committed to FORTRAN.

[The Working Man]

I programmed in Fortran for close to thirty years. What got me out of the ‘Biz’ wasn’t the programming, it was the ensuing documentation. When I first started a job that involved a one line code change plus testing and documentation took eight hours or so. When I left it was at least six month’s from start to finish plus almost a half a million dollars in overhead.

It was just too much...

Now I’m much happier doing what I’m doing.

[CapnJack]

Boy do I remember those days.

COBOL/CICS and JCL with VSAM structures.

DELETE/DEFINE files before loading them.

Fun stuff and pretty easy.

I even did Assembler for my old banks connections from the branches to the mainframe. Quickest code to read the deposit/withdraw information back and forth to the branches.

[AdmSmith]

Yes, the documentation was terrible. But everything (?) evolves even FORTRAN.

[billorites]

An acquaintance is working with OpenVMS supporting legacy VMS systems. He tells me the average age of folks in the office in around 55 years.

Time to fire up the old PDP-10.

[bassmaner]

+1

[djf]

I remember what was it, about 20 years ago, I threw away a deck of Cobol cards that were a language interpreter for something - think it was a tape management system.

Since then, I’ve consulted, been an employee, but now simply contract as a systems programmer.engineer exclusively for mainframes.

But don’t get me wrong - I agree with you premise, that no one knows Cobol or Fortran or any of those anymore.
And sadly, as far as the Internet goes, Cobol would have kicked the shit out of Java!

[wbarmy]

OH MY SWEET HEART

That is the first thing I ever did on a computer, but the output was to a printer, and each round had to be printed out.

I was in high school in Dallas, 1977, and they had the printer and a phone connection to the mainframe at the Dallas Public Library.

Eventually taught myself Basic and Machine Language programming.

[ConservativeMind]

FORTRAN, PL/1 and COBOL were not hard to learn. PL/1 was my favorite.

[laker_dad]

At 60, I can handle the COBOL/FORTRAN. What I can’t handle is the SOX BS and dealing with the people in India. Retired I shall stay...

[djf]

Seriously, BASIC is one of my favorite languages!

It’s very english-like and works pretty much the way you want,

I would say Rexx, but then you get into comparisons with clists, etc.

[wbarmy]

I actually moved from Basic to PASCAL in college and tried my hand at that for awhile.

Now, I do nothing with programming. Life sent me in another direction.

[Dilbert56]

Interesting article. I'd add that the companies need to involve their own people, not just contractors. They also need to verify the skills. There are too many contractors who claim to have a skill and then read the manual the night before.

Worked on one project to move key applications off a mainframe. The replacement system would have been more flexible but required over a hundred servers to replace 1/3 of one mainframe LPAR. When management saw the cost, the whole project was cancelled. Ironically, the best replacement configuration turned out to be...a mainframe supporting virtual servers.

[Dilbert56]

And my first daughter’s birth announcements, in 1983, were sent out on punched cards.

[rbg81]

Once you know one programming language, moving to another is usually pretty easy. It should only take someone skilled in the more modern languages a week to learn COBOL. The hardest part might be doing without all the Object Oriented language features they regularly use.

The hardest languages to learn were Lisp and (especially) Prolog, because they are so fundamentally different from the others.

[MortMan]

They parked the punch cards in the common block. ;-P

[Dr. Sivana]

I actually moved from Basic to PASCAL in college and tried my hand at that for awhile.

When I took Introduction to Programming MATH 105H in 1982, we had to use STANDARD PASCAL on a DEC-20. NO STRING HANDLERS! Characters (other than the occasional WRITELN) had to be handled one character at a time.

I have had an aversion to it ever since.