The Many Charms of COBOL
Our development software MANASYS Jazz functions by generating COBOL, so I always notice publications about COBOL and other languages developed when mainframes were dominant. This article particularly interested me: -
The Many Charms of COBOL. Published Sept 5th 2024 in Planet Mainframe.
The article was written by Uwe Graf , the Lead Modernization Architect with our German Reseller, EasiRun Europa Gmbh. Like me, he came to COBOL after first learning PL/I, but we were both forced to learn COBOL by market realities. Although created more than 65 years ago, COBOL continues to dominate commercial programming: there are still between 200 and 250 billion lines of COBOL in production, and an estimated 1.5 billion lines of new COBOL written every year. Yet few universities teach COBOL, and there is a growing need for programmers who can work with it.
COBOL is uniquely suited to commercial programming, but it is verbose, requiring many lines of definition and logic for tasks of any complexity. Coincidentally, one of the related articles cited in Uwe's article, Creating the Future by Slashing Complexity, was an article that I wrote in 2019 for Planet Mainframe. It provides a good introduction to my motivation for the development of MANASYS Jazz which can create Jazz programs from data definitions. A single click turns these Jazz programs into COBOL, typically 20 to 50 lines of COBOL per line of Jazz, that will compile and run first time. See the Jazz web page for more information about MANASYS Jazz, and to see what it can do.
Contact us or EasiRun if you have any questions, or if you'd like to download a copy of MANASYS Jazz to try it out.