Cobol technical demonstration [closed]

Question

I'm working as a COBOL programmer - have a 6 months work experience - for a consulting firm . Today, with the rest the COBOL "department", I had a meeting with the new director of my company.

After an initial analysis made by the new team in charge, they noticed that, comparing to the other services/technologies our company has to offer - Java, C++, Objective-C, etc - COBOL was lacking "advertisement". He stated that whenever members of other teams are in-between projects they implement small demos which then can be shown to our clients whenever there is a presentation of our company. He gave examples of widgets for mobile devices in Objective-C, cool web-pages with HTML5, etc. And noticed that there is nothing in COBOL like that. So he wants us to develop some kind of tool/app to show what our competences.

We already told him that COBOL is used under the hood, and doesn't have bells and whistles to show. Also that when hiring a COBOL programmer/analyst the most important for the client is that he shows he has "business logic" knowledge.

I know that the coding part is very important but after a two weeks introduction to the mainframe environment and to COBOL I was capable of doing my programming tasks easily. But with a 6 months experience working in a bank I find myself having to, nearly everyday, ask questions regarding "business logic" to the "gurus" just so that I don't end up changing the logic of the process when performing some maintenance task.

Can we really make something (tool/app) that shows or future clients that we have something different to offer than all the other company's which provide the same services? Or if not, is there anything that we can say to our manager so that he understands that COBOL is different from the other languages and it's purpose is not to display pretty graphics on the screen.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I think you're absolutely right - the "curly brace" languages have had a lot of marketing of the brand from IBM , Oracle/Sun and Microsoft over the last 20 years.

Micro Focus is trying to do something about this. They just relaunched www.cobol.com which includes a nice set of video testimonial to the power of COBOL.

There's a great video available showing some of the demos Micro Focus built as part of the development of the soon to be released "Visual COBOL R3" product. These demos include web services, rich browser-based clients, parallel processing and more (they aren't all shown in the video). Micro Focus will shortly be launching new resources for COBOL developers that will include these samples.