With free Cobol courses and additional forums, IBM is responding to an unexpectedly high demand for corresponding programmers. Parts of the critical infrastructure there, such as healthcare and transportation, use software that was written in the programming language. The measures are intended to help accelerate the expansion of systems in the wake of the corona crisis.
Cobol courses based on open source, aimed at beginners and advanced users. For this purpose, IBM and the Linux Foundation initially only use Microsoft’s VS Code. The reason for the initiative is that, particularly unemployment reporting systems are currently very heavily overloaded due to the corona crisis. The code for this is partly written in Cobol and runs on mainframes from IBM.
Cobol Applications Are Currently Still Being Used In Public Administration
In addition, a large number of Cobol applications are currently still being used, particularly in public administration. According to the announcement from IBM, this is a Cobol code, which is still used in the banking and finance sectors. The aim of the initiative is to be able to react as quickly as possible to the changed need for Cobol programming. This includes a forum for new and old Cobol programmers, which should serve to bring together clients and developers. It should not matter whether it is retired Cobol veterans, professionals who currently want to help, or students who want to work on Cobol projects. There is also a technology forum for Cobol, which is intended to exchange and solve current problems with the old programming language.
The most important part of the initiative for newcomers is an open source training program for Cobol, which should provide appropriate material for further training. The first documents will be published under a free license in the coming days. In addition to helping for and through the community, IBM also works closely with its customers to help them in the current situation.
