Reports of COBOLs Imminent Demise Premature

Colleges, corporate initiatives help venerable language stay vital

By Geoff Koch

January 1, 2007 —

The idea of commingling grandfatherly COBOL with more sprightly languages runs counter to any notions about the impending demise of mainframes. But such notions—which generally hold that mainframes are on their way out thanks to newly powerful x86 servers, newer programming languages and a looming shortage of COBOL-savvy engineers—don’t appear to hold up well against the reality of the mainframe market today.

Arguably, no programming language is more associated with mainframes than COBOL, which has been subject to more than occasional ridicule during its long existence. The acronym stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, though there are several stinging alternatives, including Compiles Only Because of Luck and Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language.

However, more than four decades after the language was created, many technologists remain willing to sing its praises, especially when it comes to its ability to handle huge volumes of information in large corporate and government data centers.

“There is no other language that will match COBOL in this respect,” said Rui de Oliveira, author of “The Power of COBOL,” published in October. Oliveira, a 30-year programming veteran and founder of the Luso Computer Institute in South Africa, added that COBOL “has also shown itself to be an excellent vehicle for teaching the art and science of programming.”

COBOL ON CAMPUS
Though perhaps waning, instruction in COBOL and other legacy technologies is still available at several colleges and universities, in part due to programs sponsored by vendors with significant skin in the mainframe game.

IBM has an academic initiative to make mainframe technologies more accessible to budding computer professionals. The company provides curriculum to more than 300 universities worldwide and sponsors an annual “Master the Mainframe” contest to foment interest in large-scale computing.

Micro Focus, too, works with university partners, in part by providing low-cost licensing of its software for classroom instruction. Zhenyu Huang, a professor of business information systems at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, Mich., teaches a PC-version of Micro Focus Net Express, a COBOL development environment for extending legacy applications to the .NET Framework.

Yet Huang acknowledged that Central Michigan is among a dwindling number of campuses to devote time and resources to COBOL. “Many schools have adopted the perception that COBOL is dying and replaced their COBOL courses with other ‘hot’ programming courses in languages like Java and C#,” he said. “This is the current trend in higher education and it may not be turned.”

Comments like these fuel fears of an onrushing legacy skills gap as mainframe pros start eyeing retirement en masse while billions of lines of COBOL remain installed in business-critical applications around the world. And more than a few mainframe modernization vendors do their part to pour gasoline on these smoldering concerns.

Since the end of October, Micro Focus has announced support for Eclipse and Windows Vista, updated products to help COBOL developers bridge to the .NET Framework, and ongoing work through a variety of its offerings to bring service-oriented architecture to mainframes. And on Nov. 7, the company announced the purchase of HAL Knowledge Solutions, which provides application portfolio management software.

“We want mainframes to take their rightful place alongside more contemporary Java- and .NET-based platforms,” said Julian Dobbins, a Micro Focus director of product management and a former COBOL programmer. “We’re saying, ‘Come out from behind the green screen and play.’”

BABY BOOMER ‘CRISIS’?
Another company, PathPoint Software, offers a mainframe application analysis tool, and prominently displays a datasheet on its home page with the title “The Baby Boomer Mainframe Application Crisis Is Coming!”

Still another is BluePhoenix Solutions, which advocates moving assets off mainframes. Tom O’Connell, BluePhoenix director of research and development, recently told SD Times, “It’s not just the COBOL programmers; it’s the whole mainframe environment” that is destined to become scarce in the future, making it difficult for companies to maintain their mainframe applications. (See “Following the Rules for Mainframe Modernization,” Nov. 15, 2006, page 4.)

Forrester analyst Phil Murphy is skeptical about projections of any sudden shortage of skilled mainframe personnel. In a Nov. 23 research report last year, Murphy said that most such projections rely on fuzzy math that assumes programmers don’t move around and acquire new skills, interests and career directions beyond their college or university training.

“There will be no intense period during which a large percentage of programmers retire,” Murphy wrote. “Rather, some programmers will start much sooner and others will start later, making it less noticeable because it will be spread out over a much longer time frame: 2005 to 2035, as opposed to 2020 to 2030.”

Recent IBM sales data from its z-series servers similarly fail to provide any more immediate signs of weakness in the mainframe market.

Thanks in part to 24.5 percent year over year growth in z-series revenue, IBM captured nearly 60 percent of high-end enterprise server sales in the third quarter of 2006, according to IDC. IBM’s MIPS shipments—MIPS stands for million of instructions per second and is a common way of billing for computing power in the mainframe market—went up 16 percent and the installed base of mainframe MIPS worldwide passed 10 million MIPS for the first time in IBM’s history.

Surely, rip-and-replace mainframe-to-x86 projects do take place, often driven by events such as a vendor ceasing support of a particular platform or a post-acquisition effort to consolidate onto a single platform.

But against the backdrop of what appears to be healthy market for mainframes, Micro Focus’ Dobbins said he expects to see increasing activity to make the mainframe interface more contemporary and easier to fit into today’s Web-powered and service-oriented businesses.

“New programmers shouldn’t suddenly have to wrestle with a TSO green screen editor after going through college playing with Visual Studio or Eclipse,” said Dobbins, describing the motivation behind Micro Focus’ ongoing work. “We see the mainframe as continuing to cement its relevance.”

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/29965

dynaTrace manager reports on AJAX transactions dynaTrace AJAX Edition can also display information about JavaScript usage and other performance characteristics

LogiXML Reports It Will Do Java When LogiXML chose to optimize its reporting software for the .NET platform, it effectively raised a barrier to its adoption,...

GWT 1.5 Imminent SAN FRANCISCO — The rise of the Google Web Toolkit could lead to the demise of the Struts Java Web...

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?

Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST