The sharp increase in US jobless claims due to the COVID-19 pandemic has literally collapsed the work of public welfare services in the country. The problem is that practically with knowledge of the ancient programming language COBOL, in which civil service programs are written. To urgently educate coders about the secrets of COBOL, IBM and the support team have begun creating free online courses.
Recently, IBM and the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project (designed to create open source projects to run on mainframes) with the initiative to revive and support the COBOL programming community. For this, two forums have been created, one for the community, the search for specialists and determining their qualifications, and the second is technical. But most importantly, IBM, together with specialized educational institutions, is preparing free courses on COBOL, which will be posted on .
COBOL was introduced in 1959 as the first programming language for free distribution of programs to run on mainframes. The same COBOL programs for processing unemployment claims have been running for about 40 years. IBM still ships COBOL compatible mainframes.
The pandemic has led to an unpredictable increase in applications and forced changes to the conditions for applications. It is extremely difficult to display changes in the program code of the ancient language, since there are practically no specialists with COBOL knowledge at the proper level. Will free courses help with this? Why not. But only this will not happen tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, while it was necessary to make changes yesterday.
Source: 3dnews.ru