Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> This is all based on a myth though, primarily the myth that "only COBOL" developers are a common thing

Anyone who knows anything about COBOL knows that there’s rarely such a thing as “only COBOL”. The majority of the remaining COBOL shops are IBM mainframe, which means it isn’t just COBOL-CICS, JCL, VSAM, IMS, DB2, TSO, ISPF are all in the mix as well (maybe not all of them at the one site). And if you aren’t doing it on an IBM mainframe, it is probably deeply integrated into some other platform - e.g. PeopleSoft still uses COBOL for some of its batch jobs (especially payroll), and while I’ve never looked at its COBOL code, I’m sure it isn’t vanilla COBOL either, it has some PeopleSoft specific calls in it. Or maybe you are doing Oracle Pro*COBOL (SQL precompiler for the Oracle RDBMS). It’s really no different than Java - who does “just Java”, as opposed to J2EE or Spring or whatever?




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: