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**nycsusan@hotmail.com** · 07-17-2001, 01:18 PM

Remember Cobol? If You Don't, Get Reacquainted

... this time from ZDNet - eWeek http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/g...764006,00.html From the dustbin, COBOL rises Long-lived legacy apps keep creaky skills crucial By Stephanie Wilkinson, eWEEK May 28, 2001 12:00 AM ET Like John Travolta and bell-bottoms, COBOL is back. The 40-year-old programming language is being dusted off after years of being regarded as hopelessly out of fashion. According to a report by Gartner Inc., applications managing about 85 percent of the world's business data are written in COBOL. And despite the rush to object-oriented languages, 60 percent of the world's code base is still written in COBOL--and that figure is expected to increase. That all adds up to plenty of organizations that will have to work hard to find the skills to support legacy code--particularly since so many COBOL programmers are on the brink of retiring or dying. One such organization is the Public Schools Retirement Systems for the City of St. Louis, which recently needed to hire COBOL programmers for a two-year project involving moving the public schools' retirement payroll system off an IBM mainframe and onto a Dell Computer Corp. 4300 server. The St. Louis government body went the way many enterprises are forced to go nowadays: with a contract programmer. Other organizations are lucky enough to be staffed with the skilled workers they need, but they live under the shadow of impending attrition. That's the story at C.A. Curtze Co. Inc., a wholesale food service distributor in Erie, Pa., that is so heavily invested in the language that it spun off a separate company, SalesPro Technologies Inc., to market its home-grown order entry and management tool--based in COBOL, of course--to other retailers. Are there any other places besides retirement homes to find these increasingly rare programmers? Hiring offshore talent isn't the answer, experts say. Imported workers lack understanding of the ingredient that makes COBOL so invaluable--its incorporation of business procedures. Of course, the retiree community still has an untapped vein of skills. That's evident by looking at resources such as The Senior Staff Job Information Search Inc., a company in Campbell, Calif., that maintains a database of some 2,500 names of ex-COBOLers. President Bill Payson estimates there are probably another 8,000 to 10,000 employable retired programmers in the United States. Hiring managers at the Public Schools Retirement Systems for the City of St. Louis have had to go both the retiree route and the contracting route when they noticed other pools of COBOL skills drying up. "It's getting harder to find good COBOL people," said Lonnie Caldwell, director of technology. To complete an IBM mainframe-to-Dell 4300 server migration, Caldwell hired a COBOL veteran with 25 years of experience from a local IT contracting service. "If we had the budget, I'd hire him outright in a minute," he said. Caldwell is about seven years from retirement. When he goes, he said, he hopes to find his replacement among the younger set of programmers coming out of universities that still teach COBOL skills. Unfortunately, many four-year colleges and universities have cut back or stopped giving classes in COBOL. "You can't get the new kids--the dot-commers--to take a second look at COBOL," Senior Staff's Payson said. "It's far easier to teach a COBOLer the dot-com stuff than vice versa. Knowing COBOL means you already know how the business runs." Luckily, some institutions are keeping up with the need. Paul Halpern, director of traditional solutions marketing at Merant Co., maker of COBOL-to-Web enabling tools, advises enterprises to look to the two-year and community college programs. "They tend to be more practical and more responsive to the actual needs of the businesses around them," said Halpern, in Mountain View, Calif. And while the four-year colleges may have scrapped COBOL courses in their computer sciences departments, he said, some are still teaching it in their business schools and in-house IT departments. That's lucky for Tony Darden. As director of programming at C.A. Curtze, Darden has over the past few years watched other companies abandon COBOL in favor of languages such as Visual Basic. But with an estimated 700 COBOL-based programs and hundreds of thousands of lines of COBOL code already in use at Curtze, that approach struck him as foolhardy. So in 1994, his IT group began examining tools that allow COBOL to work in a Windows environment. After settling on AcuCOBOL--software from Acucorp Inc., of San Diego--Darden never looked back. Indeed, it was the success of Curtze's eight programmers in marrying COBOL with newer environments such as Windows that led to the SalesPro spinoff. As sales grow, so will his need for COBOLers. "We'll have a need for COBOLers for as long as I can see," Darden said. That's good news for those COBOLers who haven't mothballed themselves yet--and who don't plan on it any time soon. Stephanie Wilkinson is a free-lance writer and can be reached at stephw@cfw.com. COBOL by the numbers Crunching the COBOL numbers leads to one chilling conclusion: The projected proliferation of COBOL code over the next four years goes hand-in-hand with a drastic dwindling of the number of programmers who know anything about supporting the language. Here's the skills-hungry picture Gartner paints: 200 billion Number of lines of COBOL code in existence in 2000 5 billion lines Estimated annual growth of COBOL code over the next four years 90,000 Number of COBOL programmers in North America in 2000 13 percent Estimated annual decrease in number of COBOL programmers due to retirement and death Source: Gartner

**nycsusan@hotmail.com** · 07-17-2001, 01:43 PM

Remember Cobol? If You Don't, Get Reacquainted

FYI, here an interesting perspective about COBOL. Check out this article entitled "Remember Cobol? If You Don't, Get Reacquainted". Here's a snippet ... "(May 21, 2001) When I mention the word Cobol to IT people, they look at me as if I just awoke from a 20-year coma. Many IT professionals consider Cobol, like Latin, to be a dead language. But rumors of Cobol's death have been greatly exaggerated. Companies can't ignore their Cobol software assets and need to incorporate them into their IT strategies." "IT people treat Cobol like a pariah. Most universities have dropped it from their curricula. Vendors shun the word Cobol in their marketing literature, even when Cobol tools are responsible for much of their revenue. Programmers who know Cobol tend to de-emphasize it on their resumes." "In spite of its reputation, Cobol remains a resilient force in IT. Dale Vecchio, research director at Gartner Inc., says there are roughly 180 billion lines of Cobol worldwide. This isn't surprising, given that Cobol has been around for more than 40 years. What is surprising is Gartner's comment in a February research note stating that 15% of all new application functionality through 2005 will be in Cobol." For the full story, go here: http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/sto...O60683,00.html

**R.Daugherty** · 07-17-2001, 01:43 PM

Remember Cobol? If You Don't, Get Reacquainted

Ted was asking where the COBOLers and RPGers are going to come from. It's a real good question, as Susan points out here... Ralph

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