A sudden increase in unemployment benefit applications in the USA, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, has literally overwhelmed the work of government social services in the country. The problem is that there are virtually 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 project Open Mainframe Project, curated by the Linux Foundation (intended for creating open-source projects to run on mainframes), launched an initiative to revive and support the community of COBOL programmers. Two forums have been created for this purpose: one for the community, to find specialists and assess their qualifications, and the other is technical. Most importantly, IBM, together with specialized educational institutions, is preparing free COBOL courses that will be posted on .
The COBOL language was introduced in 1959 as the first programming language for freely distributing programs for mainframe operation. The same COBOL programs for processing unemployment benefit applications have been working for about 40 years. IBM still supplies mainframes compatible with COBOL.
The pandemic has led to an unpredictable increase in applications filed and forced changes in the application submission conditions. Reflecting these changes in the programming code of this ancient language is extremely difficult, as there are practically no specialists with adequate knowledge of COBOL 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.
Allikas: 3dnews.ru
