The sharp increase in unemployment benefit applications in the U.S., caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, has literally overwhelmed the work of government social services in the country. The problem is that there are almost with knowledge of the ancient programming language COBOL, on which government programs are written. To urgently train coders in the secrets of COBOL, IBM and a support group have started creating free online courses.
Recently, IBM and the Open Mainframe Project, curated by the Linux Foundation (aimed at creating open-source projects for running on mainframes), initiated a move to revive and support the community of COBOL programmers. Two forums have been created for this purpose: one for community engagement, finding specialists, and assessing their qualifications, and the second one for technical discussions. Most importantly, IBM, along with relevant educational institutions, is preparing free COBOL courses that will be made available on .
COBOL was introduced in 1959 as the first programming language for freely distributing software to run on mainframes. The same COBOL programs for processing unemployment benefit applications have been operating for about 40 years. IBM still delivers mainframes compatible with COBOL.
The pandemic has led to an unpredictable increase in applications and forced changes in the application process. Reflecting these changes in the code of this ancient language is extremely difficult, as there are almost no specialists with a sufficient level of COBOL knowledge left. Will free courses help with this? Why not. But this will not happen tomorrow or the day after, while changes should have been made yesterday.
Source: 3dnews.ru
