[plug] What language to learn? - COBOL

[Richard Meyer]

As a S/370/390/z-series COBOL/Assembler/C programmer,

Much as I would like to reply to you peasants from my mansion in
Peppermint Grove, I cannot - I have nearly 30 years experience in COBOL
- at least 5 years programming myself, and the rest gunning for problems
the application programmers were involved in .... as a Systems
Programmer  - think Sysadmin with a white coat ...   :-)

I was unemployed from the end of Feb 2010 until I got my present job - I
really would like to hear about the COBOL jobs I missed - I applied for
everything I saw ....

I've decided that my my future is in another direction - namely Linux,
but I sometimes wonder .....




On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 15:02 +0800, Hooker wrote:
> My suggestion would be to learn Java well. It's fairly common for development work 
> and you ought to be able to make the jump to C# without much difficulty if you feel 
> the need in the future.
> 
> C++ is another FOSS language that occurs a lot, but it's certainly not trivial to 
> learn well and write fluidly.
> 
> Predictably the market has a lot of .Net work, but this being the plug mailing list 
> and your question about FOSS suggests that your interests are elsewhere. Daniel is 
> right about COBOL - there's a truly amazing amount of it with a diminishing number 
> of competent programmers. Once you understand how to define data, it's a easy 
> language to use. Again, that may not be to your taste.
> 
> My advice would be to learn a couple of languages well enough to write good code, at 
> least one of which should be strong OO (i.e. not Perl, much as I enjoy the 
> language). If you enjoy the work, you'll pick up other languages as you go.
> 
> Paul
> 
> 

-- 
Richard Meyer

Welcome to the Internet:  Where men are men, women are men, and children
are FBI agents.

Linux Counter user #306629