A drastic increase in unemployment benefit applications in the US, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, has literally overwhelmed the operations of government social services in the country. The problem is that there are practically who know the ancient programming language COBOL, on which government programs are written. To urgently train coders in the mysteries 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 (intended for creating open-source projects to run on mainframes), initiated efforts to revive and support the COBOL programming community. Two forums have been created for this purpose: one for community engagement, finding specialists, and assessing their qualifications, and the second is technical. But most importantly, IBM is preparing free COBOL courses in collaboration with relevant educational institutions, which will be made available on .
The COBOL language was introduced in 1959 as the first programming language for the free distribution of programs to run on mainframes. The same COBOL programs for processing unemployment benefit applications have been operational for about 40 years. IBM still supplies mainframes compatible with COBOL.
The pandemic has led to an unpredictable increase in submitted applications and forced changes in the application processes. Reflecting these changes in the code of the ancient language is extremely difficult, as there are practically no specialists left with adequate knowledge of COBOL. 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.
Forrás: 3dnews.ru
