Pl I To Cobol Converter Money

A key issue with mainframes is that the cohort of supporting programmers is dwindling. While normally this wouldn't be a problem in that a falling supply of programmers would be offset by an increasing amount of salary those causing a rising supply of programmers via the law of supply and demand, I'm not sure this is really happening for mainframes. While they still form critical infrastructure for many businesses, the simple fact is there isn't an adequate number of young programmers coming up along to keep the support population populated.

What makes mainframes unattractive to young programmers? I'm a young programmer.

I've never seen a mainframe, never had a sandbox/virtual mainframe to play with, never had a friend come up to me and say, 'This is really cool, check it out!' I see the web every day, there's readily available - and free - webapp dev learning tools, and all my friends are doing neat stuff in it. Which am I going to choose? (Although, if I did have access to one I'd be sure to check it out, just because it might be interesting.

(Comment because this is essentially a +1 for things said below.) – May 11 '11 at 19:51 5. I'm an old programmer and I'm not interested in mainframes. My reasons will probably be similar to the reasons given by young programmers, however, albeit without the ignorance of the technology so evident in many of these answers. First, let's get the ignorance out of the way: • The various claims of inability to try out mainframes are false. Has been available since 1999—likely for longer than many of the people answering have been programming—and despite IBM's whinging over it the odds of it going away anytime soon are negligible (especially given that it's open source).

(d) distribution of language use was 56% COBOL, 22% assembler, 12% PL/I, 7% FORTRAN and 3% others. The report remarks that the sample. This 9 million can be compared with the money now spent by EEC users in converting software, which the first report estimated at 2CO million per year. Thus if the projects make. Customized, Automated Conversion of. Assembler, PL/I, COBOL, DYL & More. Don't let legacy languages lock you in. One of the biggest obstacles to migrating mainframe applications is the programming languages that they are written in. Languages such as Assembler are completely chained to the mainframe.

While it is, in fact, true that you cannot (legally) run the expensive software for it, there is plenty of software available you can run on it, including software that is actually still in fairly common use out there. • Again, contrary to public opinion, there is more to mainframes than COBOL, CICS and RPG2. Indeed almost (but not quite) anything you can run on your PC running Linux you can run on a mainframe. So why is it that I've avoided mainframes for all my life after encountering them in school?

Well: • While it is true that you can use more than COBOL, CICS, RPG2, etc. In mainframes, odds are very high that if you work with them this is what you'll be relegated to doing.

Even worse, despite COBOL having been massively 'modernized' in the past two decades or so (scare quotes because I still don't think it's a very modern language), most of the coding you'll do in COBOL will still be in old-style code because. • There's very little actual new development going on in mainframes. If you land a job at IBM working for their mainframe R&D division you might get the chance to do new development (and in that case you might even really enjoy your job!). In reality, though, face it: you won't be working there.

You'll be working in the back room of some financial institution or other maintaining 50-year old COBOL code written by someone who still thinks that 64KB is a whopping huge pile'o'RAM. (This same guy will probably be your boss.) • While it is true that you can run Linux on mainframes, and thus have access to pretty much any programming language or environment you'd like, again, as with working for IBM's mainframe R&D, you're not going to get that job. It's back to maintaining that 50-year old COBOL. • Corporate programming is very efficient at sucking the soul out of you (and remember, it's corporate programming you're going to be doing as a mainframe programmer unless you're VERY lucky). • It's a ghetto, and an ever-shrinking one.

(It's like this way.) If you get too steeped in mainframe lore you get further distanced from anything non-mainframe. You can try to keep up, but you won't. I know someone pointed out that mainframes have grown in sales while other server sectors shrunk a bit, but server programming is the minority these days.

Hell PCs in general are losing importance. The world of programming is very wide and very diverse and having one minuscule portion of it grow in comparison to another minuscule portion is meaningless when compared to, say, the sudden, explosive growth of programming in something as trivial as the iPhone (which itself is a minority platform – by far).

No, start working in mainframes and you'll only have other mainframers to share your thoughts, your joys and your rages with – and they're a dying breed. This leads to a negative feedback loop which makes the herd shrink even further and faster. I'm sure there's lots of reasons that a mainframe programmer could give why the career is rewarding and full of joys and interesting challenges. Indeed I've heard many of them from people trying to recruit me into the field. In the end, however, I remained unconvinced, mostly because of the ghetto problem. If I got in and found I didn't like it, how do I get out? I am 27 and have been a professional developer for more than 4 years (so I hope that qualifies me as still young).

I also work as an Integration specialist so I get a lot of exposure to the mainframe development world. • There appears to be little or no innovation going on in the community. I know that this is not exactly the case, but to the casual observer it seems so.

No one want to get involved in an area where it is difficult to 'leave your mark'. • How much new development or new projects are happening? None as far as I can tell. If you go into this area you are condemning yourself to be a maintenance programmer forever. • It is not accessible to the casual learner. Most people started off learning how to program on their PC at home.

Again, most people do not like to switch from what they know. So making the transition from one to the other take time and motivation. Given the other 2 reasons, there are not many takers. +1: This jibes well with my experience. The absolute last resort is to put new code on old systems, and a lot of the venerable lines are going out of support, so the old 'reliability' line is starting to fray.

One thing that you don't mention is that mainframe maintenance is very specific and very proprietary. You put years of your life into a dead or dying branch of tech. It's not going to help you get any job except a job working on the same sort of system, and there are fewer of those all the time. – May 11 '11 at 16:06. I will turn 40 in September so I don't know if that qualifies me as a young person any longer but I do have first hand personal knowledge of why someone might not want to be a mainframe programmer. The last 10 years of my working life has been dedicated to mainframe programming. Learning all there is to know about batch, jcl, Cobol, Assembler, Easytrieve, CICS and Web Services and I enjoyed it immensely and would still be doing it if not for noticing a trend.

My last place of employment had me working side by side with web developers (jsp, javascript, spring and hibernate) and I noticed that the company was bringing in web developers with comparable years experience for a lot more money. Not to mention the fact that the web developers position was a lot less stressful. After getting fed up with this trend I decided to get out of the mainframe business.

Now I am in a position where I develop web services with java and front end UI with javascript. Crazy Mohan Comedy Drama Free Download. This style of programming is no more difficult than what I did on the mainframe but now I earn more money and have less head ache. I no longer get that call at 2:00 am that something abended and the core system processes are waiting on me to fix my issues. So, give me one good reason why I would stay as a mainframe programmer when I can earn more money and have less stress in my life as a distributed systems programmer?

I'm sure there are circumstances where companies pay mainframers as well as distributed systems guy's but I personally haven't found them. Also, I began doing job searches from both perspectives and discovered the distributed systems job listings outnumbered the mainframe job listings at least 10 to 1. That tells me that at the present moment for me to have better job opportunities the mainframe is not the place to be. From what I have seen so far, and comparing to Linux and Windows, the basic problem with mainframes and midframes is that you MUST pay up front to use them. And pay a lot. For everything. This is simply not the way to make students interested in something, because they cannot afford it.

If it doesn't interest them, they will probably not voluntarily make a career of it. Unfortunately IBM's business model does not allow for making the machines cheaply available to students, or they might have a chance for changing this. One of my first summer jobs as a programmer was largely based around scraping green-screens and PRN files. Back then I probably wouldn't have minded getting my hands dirty in COBOL (that is if they had trusted me enough as a student to let me into that code), but I'm not sure if I would feel the same way about the same prospect today. I don't think the issue is really with mainframes per se. It's our industry's (often justified) obsession with the new and shiny. C is still obviously a critically important language.

Almost all embedded code and most operating systems are written in C. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. And yet it's getting harder to find C programmers.

A quick gander at the places it at 1/6 the size of [c#] and 1/4 the size of [java]. Does anyone remember when C was essentially the dominant language, arguably the only game in town? Programmers love powerful tools.

Maybe that's because (SPECULATION ALERT) most programmers are guys. You give a Java or.NET programmer the task of, say, copying a file, and many if not most will still choose to write it in Java or C# instead of writing a DOS batch file or *nix shell script that would be 50 times quicker to write and deploy. Why use a rod and reel to catch a fish when you've got a gigantic retractable net that can catch 500 fish? Yes, COBOL and PL/I are old, but so is Pascal, and it's still alive and kicking in the form of Delphi.

The aversion to the former probably stems from the fact that those languages are unwieldy compared to modern tools. Object-orientation is still a relatively new concept in the COBOL world (emphasis on relatively), but in the C# world, LINQ and generics and AJAX stopped being revolutionary years ago. Asking a developer accustomed to those tools to start programming on mainframes is like asking a rock musician to start playing on a banjo. Of course there's also the problem of the self-perpetuating stereotype. As long as younger programmers believe that there's nothing for them in mainframes (whether or not it is true), then any young programmers who do choose to go into it will end up spending most of their days around people much older.

IT isn't much of a socially-appealing profession to begin with, but the added disincentive of a generation gap tends to bring it below a lot of people's pain thresholds. No offense meant - I personally have spent most of my life working with people a good deal older, but not everybody has that background or that capability. Finally, most programmers don't enjoy maintenance work, and almost all mainframe work is maintenance.

There isn't a lot of new software being written in PL/I. Any job that is defined entirely or largely around maintenance code automatically starts off with a negative score. There are positives to working on legacy code ('legacy' encompassing mainframes and many other things), which you'll probably need to play up if you're trying to attract a younger crowd: • The systems are, as you say, critical infrastructure. Younger developers, at least in the business world (not Google/Microsoft), often don't get a chance to make any real impact. It's disheartening to work on a system that you know is just going to be abandoned or superseded after a few months or years. Mainframe apps that have already been running for 50 years are probably going to run for a lot more because it makes no sense for the companies to rebuild them, so the work you do in them is actually important to a lot of people. • If you are one of those few companies that actually does have an inclination to 'upgrade', then a lot of programmers, both young and old, will be attracted by that opportunity, because then there are twin opportunities to work on mission-critical code and to flex some of those C#/Java muscles.

Obviously no sane company would just scrap the mainframe and rebuild from scratch, but I've seen systems which (for example) have a COBOL core that integrates with Java components. • Finally, there's the indispensability - at least, as we outsiders perceive it. When all your code is in.NET then there's always the risk that the owners will trade you in for a fresh-out-of-college graduate or worse, an offshore team, in a misguided attempt to cut costs. I don't think that happens very often in the mainframe world, especially if what you say is true and supply seems to be dwindling.

Of course, this point is moot if you don't pay well enough; salaries need to be adjusted to reflect that dwindling supply, otherwise people won't 'sell.' I'm sure there are a lot of younger developers out there who wouldn't refuse a reasonably generous offer from a company that appeared to be going out of its way to make the work environment appealing to younger employees. But if you want to reach them then you'd be wise to play on your strengths, and you might even have to start doing some marketing; we tend to view mainframes as a different and very foreign world, and I'm pretty sure I didn't see you guys at the campus job fair 10 years ago working to change that perception. To boil it down to a single sentence: Nothing makes mainframes unattractive, it's just that nothing makes them attractive either, and that puts them at a serious disadvantage when compared to the bleeding edge which offers us huge productivity boosts and free soft drinks.

@aaronaught: You have to understand the process, but the code can usually go take a walk. So many things are done to get around the limitations of the system. If I have to send an encrypted credit card batch to our Merchant provider (for example), it's actually easier to do that from a modern Linux machine.

And reporting is vastly easier: we do tons of reports and projections, most of which are done on historical data, and so we can offload datasets and put them on a modern database, and then generate flashy reports with Crystal reports (or whatever). – May 11 '11 at 19:36 2. I'm young-ish (mid 30's) and currently work in mainframe support. RPG, COBOL, propietary 4GL crap. Development is slow, and where possible, is migrated to more modern hardware using more modern languages.

Mainframe development is so cumbersome compared to modern systems that the mainframe itself tends to get relegated to the back-end, while more modern languages are used to do the sorts of reporting and data transforms that used to be done on the mainframe itself. At this point, we've even turned most of the data entry into a batch driven process, so the only things that remain on the server are billing related.

While it may seem like a good niche to jump into, I think many companies are coming to the realization that they don't really need these systems anymore. Change happens slowly in the world of finance, but it does happen. Personally I don't understand what the marketable advantage is to mainframes.

Fast number and data crunching? Why can't I distribute that across a farm for processing, or buy a beefy 'normal' server. High redundancy and scalability? I'd rather have a Linux server farm or a set of virtual servers. Virtualization and multiple OS's? Perhaps there is a sizable performance difference for using this instead of a 'cloud' strategy? While I would love to understand all these things in more detail, lack of useful explanations of what differentiates a mainframe is the primary reason as to why I don't program for those systems.

I'm 25 and currently in an MSCS program (my background is not CS) and I'm definitely interested in mainframes. The problem is, I'm not sure where to even get started. I've looked at COBOL and don't know where to get a decent compiler (not even sure what a decent compiler is for COBOL, I know there is an open-source compiler, but not sure what quality it has). I just don't see a lot of information for it and to be honest, time spent looking for that is time that I could be working actively on a project in.Net or Java (I prefer.Net but school work is in Java). Like @Joshua Smith, I do worry that if I were to get into mainframes it would be my life, but I also find them more interesting then web apps and the whole Web 2.0 craze (call me crazy). To me though, it would be a lot easier to learn Java and then tether myself to SAP, as I know that can get plenty of jobs as well. This is just my personal perspective as a young programmer.

I've never worked on a mainframe before so I can't talk from first hand experience on one. But, that's the thing, I've never worked on one and don't foresee it happening any time soon. I'm not sure where you want to draw the line between mainframe and a simple server but when I think mainframe, I envision some behemoth IBM machine like the Z-Series 900 eating away $35/day just in electricity. I'm not going to have one of those in my basement any time soon to tinker with in my spare time.

Especially when I can grab an old machine, throw ubuntu-server on it, and host whatever I feel like very easily. If I have a problem, the Linux community is huge and chances are someone else has encountered my problem and posted a solution online.

I'm only guessing, but I wouldn't expect to see that level of information available for mainframe issues online.

When Mihaela Lazar first learned COBOL in the early 1970s, little did she know that she would be paving the way for a successful career several decades later. In the 2000s, Lazar got a job offer she couldn't refuse as a COBOL developer in Bucharest, Romania. She continues to work with the language today: 'Life's twists and turns took me back to COBOL,' she said.

Experts like her are hard to find, but much in demand: COBOL still powers most of the world's financial transactions and despite being over 50 years old, the programming language shows no signs of fading away. Identification division COBOL appeared in 1959, when Steve Jobs was just four years old, half a century before the arrival of the first iPhone.

The guidelines for the new programming language aimed at businesses, designed to make software more affordable and easier to write, were set at a meeting at the Pentagon. COBOL, an acronym from COmmon Business-Oriented Language, has had few updates since then, though it became object-oriented in 2002. Despite its old age, COBOL is still commonplace. The average Briton still, for example - using an ATM machine, waiting for a green traffic light, or shopping online. It's also said that there are more COBOL transactions than Google searches each day.

The language is widely used in business, finance, and in state-owned companies. Found that 48 percent of businesses and government organizations rely heavily on COBOL, compared to JavaScript's 41 percent, Java on 39 percent, and C# on 26 percent. What's more, over one-third of those surveyed said they planned to develop new applications in COBOL in the future. Environment division. Recruiters deal with a number of issues while searching for candidates.

'We need to dig deeper, COBOL devs aren't very visible,' Roxana Barbu, IT recruitment consultant at Brainspotting Romania, told ZDNet. 'Plus, they are more loyal to the company they work for and aren't interested in other offers.'

With more and more senior developers approaching retirement age and almost no university courses creating the new skilled graduates needed to compensate, COBOL jobs are becoming hard to fill. Almost half of the companies have noticed a shortage of skilled specialists and half of firms report that the average age of their COBOL teams is between 45 and 55, and more than 20 percent claim it's above 55. Recruiters find it challenging to hire experts. COBOL developers are often in their 50s or 60s, and ageism is rife in IT companies. Employers favor the young, although they won't acknowledge it openly, recruiters say. Not all employers have such a short-sighted approach and turn to experts such as Lazar for their expertise as well as younger professionals. 'My colleagues are 30 years old, on average.

The youngest one is 25,' Lazar told ZDNet. 'I grew younger thanks to them.'

Today's young developers, meanwhile, could be honing their skills for an equally long career. 'COBOL experts have the chance to focus on one area of expertise and develop their skills in a very deep way.

This gives them the opportunity to stay in a certain role for a longer period of time,' Peter Gersak, CTO for IBM South East Europe, told ZDNet. The company works with both experienced and rookie COBOL devs, trained on-site. 'A few years ago, IBM started to teach COBOL to young graduates through internship programs in Romania,' he said. The company welcomes not only IT graduates, but also those from economics backgrounds. 'COBOL programmers need to understand business logic much more than programmers in some other languages.

The market demands this kind of expertise because an understanding of business logic is so crucial.' Training young devs on COBOL is equally important for insurer NN Romania. Experienced professionals at the company help new recruits and interns better understand the capabilities of the language for transactions involving pensions, new insurance packages, or commissions.

Theodor Adam, CIO at NN Romania, told ZDNet that the company tackles the shortage of developers by constantly offering internship programs to young people. The best are later hired on a permanent contract. The company has even had Java devs switching to COBOL. 'We rarely recruit experienced employees.

Most of the time we select young people full of potential, in which we invest time and effort so that they can be reliable professionals in two years' time, or even senior professionals in three or four years,' he said. The company has chosen this path because it wants people who can easily become part of a team and fit with the organization's culture. 'We'd rather go for employees driven by change and by team spirit. If those competencies are lacking, they are harder to gain compared with [COBOL] skills and experience.' Data division COBOL's half a century career is astonishing, to say the least. Our society mocks a two-year-old smartphone or a ten-year-old car. Why is this language still guarding our financial transactions, using apps most of which are two decades old?

The quick answer is that COBOL applications still work. They meet the list of requirements business people have, and deliver the results they expect.

Reliable, no surprises. Businesses fear change. IBM's Gersak said that COBOL is widely used in transaction processing on System z mainframes, System i (AS/400) and Power systems, because 'these systems with COBOL applications are still the most reliable technology and platform'. An MIT researcher has unveiled a new approach to self-completing programming with Ur/Web. Another reason is money. 'There's a huge amount of COBOL code globally, and rewriting it would be extremely expensive,' NN's Adam added.

Hiring someone who understands the language and can tweak existing apps seems to be the most budget-friendly option for IT departments, at least for the time being. But can COBOL be trusted to handle with our money given that it appeared in 1959 and hackers have learned a great deal ever since? Catalin Cosoi, chief security strategist at Bitdefender, told ZDNet that there are very few vulnerabilities involving the language. 'COBOL wasn't designed with a security mindset. However, considering that it's used in finance and in state-owned organizations, a natural security-by-obscurity system emerged,' he said. 'COBOL software runs in a closed environment, not in the mass market, and has been tested for decades by financial organizations, hence the low number of vulnerabilities.' His comments chime with last year's.

'Security scores for COBOL applications are significantly higher than other health factor scores while changeability scores are significantly lower,' the report says. Balsa Usa Northstar Manual Physical Therapy. ' Since most of the COBOL applications are in either the financial services or insurance industry, the elevated security scores represent the critical concern with protection of confidentiality and financial assets in these industries.' The report also mentions that the average module size in COBOL was 600 lines of code, compared to just 50 lines of code for modern languages. 'Code units in Java-EE were even smaller, typically around 30 lines of code,' it adds. Procedure division How long can COBOL keep meeting our needs?

Rick Oppedisano believes it's time for a change. The VP of global R&D at Modern Systems, a company aiming to help business switch to Java or C#, told ZDNet that we're approaching the inflection point in terms of cost. Soon, it will be more difficult to maintain COBOL than to convert the code into another other language. 'The cost of running COBOL environments have increased over the past five to ten years,' he said. 'Companies that charge license fees for mainframe-related technologies have raised their rates to compensate for the number of people migrating away from these solutions.' According to Oppedisano, translating COBOL into Java can be up to five times cheaper compared to writing everything from scratch.

'In small, straightforward and well-documented environments -- very rare -- the costs can be as low as $150,000 to $200,000,' he said. 'The largest projects we've worked on, in complex environments with tens of millions of lines of COBOL code and deep testing and validation requirements, are in the $2m to $4m range.'

Costs are only part of the issue, he argues. People fear the risk of a migration failing. 'For many organizations, the legacy system is a black box - a massive amount of loosely organized COBOL code written by developers who retired or left long ago, leaving behind little documentation or standards.' Remaining faithful to COBOL often poses more risks than a migration, he adds, and old tools ultimately affect the competitiveness of the organization. 'Companies collecting valuable data in COBOL and legacy databases do not have the ability to slice and dice data across multiple sources to find new trends or customer usage patterns.'

He also said that COBOL apps and databases don't integrate with modern IT architecture or business intelligence tools. In addition, 'new features and functionality can take up to 10x longer to implement in COBOL than they can in a modern language like Java or C#.' Oppedisano anticipates that COBOL's market share will decrease by 15 to 20 percent in the next five to 10 years. 'The only companies keeping COBOL will be those slowest to change -- mostly large finance, insurance or government bodies.' Analyst houses such as Gartner in the years to come. Maybe we won't think about it when we use an ATM or while waiting for the traffic lights to turn green, but it will still be there, working away.

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