[Cialug] Programming languages: next 10 yrs

[Bill Davis]

No, COBOL is not dead. Don't hold your breath, either.

We still have COBOL at the State. New development IS occurring. They actually asked me to help out with it a few years back, as they were overloaded/short handed and my supervisor recalled seeing it on my resume. I pointed out that hadn't worked in COBOL since maybe 1985. They were ok with that.  It actually came back fairly well. Even remembered at bit of JCL. 

And a web site I maintain talks to a mainframe-based web service written in COBOL that pull data off the mainframe database. I took over maintenance of the COBOL web service side, too, a while back when the developer left. I originally just did the Java-side (JSP) work for the web site.  Neither side is needing too many changes at this point.

Lots of other languages are in use here too. I've done a bit of Ruby/Rails some years ago, a bit of VBA still crops up now and again (so far some in Excel, some in Word and some in Outlook.) I know C# and other .Net languages, PHP, etc get used at the state, and my group uses Java JSF (but not me, yet).

Flexibility and breadth of knowledge are important!  Code lasts forever. Or at least it is very wise to assume so.

 - Bill

> On Apr 28, 2017, at 11:29 AM, Daniel A. Ramaley <daniel.ramaley at drake.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On 2017-04-28 10:28, David Champion wrote:
>> Is COBOL dead yet?
> 
> We still have some COBOL running here. Thankfully, maintaining it is not
> my problem. New stuff isn't being developed in it.
> 
> Still have some Fortran too, though the new development in that language
> is pretty much limited to the physics faculty at this point.
> 
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