cobol-programming-course

A shop I worked in ages ago had a mainframe on site supporting lots of batched transactions over the course of a 24 hour period, along with the daily operations for a 35 facility logistics company, spread throughout the southeastern United States. They had a staff of 8 mainframers that ran the entire operation. All of the PCs onsite (my area of responsibility) were basically 3270 terminal clients for z/OS. Sometime later, a connection on LinkedIn pointed out the following resources: https://www.openmainframeproject.org/ https://github.com/openmainframeproject https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... Also, mainframes are really good at high throughput transactional jobs. That's why you see them in banks, transportation, insurance, etc. Big Tech™ doesn't see it as "cool" and are too focused on the Next Big Thing™, so

its more alive than banjo kazooie :) https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co...

The Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Foundation has some COBOL courses. Here is their "getting started": https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co...

A great learning resource for COBOL is the Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Programming Course. The content is self-paced with labs and the best part is you get to do the labs on a real Mainframe. Check it out: https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co...

IBM offers a free set of courses here: https://ibmzxplore.influitive.com. I played around with it a few months ago. As far as I know it's still available. It doesn't cover COBOL in great depth but does touch on various pieces of the zOS ecosystem and gives you some access to a real mainframe. There's also this COBOL course: https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... I haven't tried the later and I'm not entirely clear on how you get access to a mainframe environment for it.

It's Sunday, my dad was a COBOL programmer, sure I'll spend 15 minutes checking it out. The main site link on GitHub is a 404 though [0]. The "getting started" link in the README points to a release notes page and do you have to scroll down to find a PDF [1]. That said, the intro does start with VSCode and a plugin which provides language server support for COBOL (and PL/1!) and a CLI tool (Zowe [2]) for interaction with a Z/OS mainframe. This does seem like a pretty modern and up to date intro. Cool. I do think this could benefit from someone making a nice "modern language" landing page for it. I remember an April fools joke from 20 years ago promoting COBOL as the hot new web language, maybe it's finally time :) [0] https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... [1] https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programm

I can't answer your last question, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. From what I've seen there are z/OS emulators that can be used for practice, so it wouldn't be far fetched to transition to real hardware from there. A quick search for COBOL resources yielded https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... , so it seems possible to learn without access to the hardware.

It's certainly not as straighforward as learning a more popular language and environment, but there are online resources if you look for them. A quick search yielded https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... There appears to be an active community around it, and I'm sure getting help in an apprenticeship sort of way is possible. Again, we're talking about a niche language, so you can't expect the same level of accessibility as NodeJS or Go. As for finding jobs, they're probably few and far between, but appear to be well paid from what I've heard. Places that need COBOL programmers will announce it, opportunities will likely come up from other contacts in the community, and cold contacting companies you know are using it is always an option.

There’s also https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... which IIRC is an IBM backed open source course.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-open-mainframe-project-lau... seems to have more information but the course itself (https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co...) is just an empty Github repository. edit to add https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2020/04/09/open-ma... is the actual announcement.