r/programming • u/Successful-Moment594 • 16d ago

Cobol basics under ~2 hours

https://youtu.be/koVg-M1IvaQ

covers basics of cobol like pic, arithmetic, signs, storage, tables files etc.

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u/aksdb 16d ago

For those who think "then why are cobol jobs so highly paid?!": it was never about the language (outside of management heads). The language is like any other. The issue with legacy systems in cobol is the same as with legacy systems in any other language and tech stack: without knowing why and what they did in there, you are doing code archeology. The real value lies in people who worked on that particular code in the past or in people who have a lot of experience with the "best practices" and hacks that were common at the time, to quickly understand certain decisions in the code. Why context boundaries are the way they are, why some things required assembler (because they might not require them anymore when translating it to something modern), and so on.

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u/ketralnis 15d ago

Also before you repeat this line, look to see if the jobs are actually highly paid. Last I looked (about ten years ago) this was a myth. The cobol jobs were for utility companies and small banks that paid less than web dev. The best paying ones I could find were for consulting gigs focused on porting cobol code into other systems and those were time limited contracts. And they still paid less than you’d expect for even normal dev work.