Horses for Courses: Choosing the Right Player, Platform and Tool in the COBOL World
June 21, 2021
“OCCURS DEPENDING ON” is a wonderful clause in COBOL that resonates powerfully with a favorite answer that IBMers like to give to big, generic questions about how to choose and configure their technology: “It depends … ” In the first case, the programmer may be asking for arrays, while in the latter the IBMer is […]
ArticlesHow the Software World and Programming Practices Have Evolved
June 3, 2021
Programming, or writing software as it is commonly known today, has been my profession for 51 years, and for fun for 10 years before that. Like most things, it has changed dramatically as I have grown up with it. Starting out in 1960, we had only one manual of about 50 pages, a principles of […]
ArticlesBound to Compile: Skipping the Source Code
May 31, 2021
I like interpretive and scripting languages: The source is the code so you never have to go hunting for the original text version of a program when updating it. But they do run much more slowly than compiled ones. Consequently, some scripting languages, like REXX, can also be compiled in order to speed them up. […]
ArticlesNode.js on z/OS: How Real Is It?
May 24, 2021
Node.js is a popular environment to allow JavaScript to run outside of a browser. A 2020 Stack Overflow survey saw 50% vote Node.js as the most popular framework, library or tool. Anyone working with the open-source mainframe framework Zowe will be familiar with Node.js: it’s needed for both the Zowe server and Zowe CLI. But […]
ArticlesHow to Simplify the Lives of Non-Mainframe Trained IT Employees
April 23, 2021
Many people think that using a mainframe is hard. They have a picture in their minds of green screens and arcane subsystems that are incredibly hard to get to grips with. The trouble is that so many of the people who work on mainframes have been doing so for 40 years. And that means they […]
COBOL: What’s XML Got to Do With IT?
March 24, 2021
When I first encountered the works of Thomas Aquinas, which I’m embarrassed to say wasn’t until the beginning of my Master’s degree, commenced 29 years after I completed my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, the first thing I thought was, “This could be put into XML!” Little did I know that XML was a direct […]
ArticlesCOBOL Supports the World’s Business Operations
March 17, 2021
“Fine wine gets better with age,” or so the phrase goes. Oddly, this aphorism also in a way applies to COBOL. It was great when it was developed, but over the 60-plus years it’s been around, it’s actually improved in some ways, even enabling many companies to enter the digital age. Reports suggesting hundreds of […]
ArticlesToday’s Business Systems Run on COBOL
March 10, 2021
In my past life I was a COBOL developer. Yes, I did use Herman Hollerith 80-column punched cards to do my programming. Yes, COBOL has been around for a very long time and yes, COBOL is very alive and well in the year 2021! 60 years old and counting. Admiral Grace Hopper and COBOL Let’s […]
E-BooksTechChannel E-book: Unlocking COBOL Business Value
March 9, 2021
The ubiquity of both the IBM Z platform and COBOL programming language comes from the forethought IBM put into each in 1964 when the first mainframe was launched. COBOL was optimized for business processing with no need to recompile programs. As a result, it continues to run the world’s economy today. But many COBOL shops […]
ArticlesOld COBOL Dog, New JSON, XML and Mobile Workload Tricks
March 3, 2021
What is an old dog? What is a new trick? If COBOL were a human, its 61 years might make it seem eligible for early retirement. But something strange has been happening in the world of established business technology, beginning with the non-retirement of highly-experienced technologists. Yes, there are plenty of people who have followed […]