IMHO the market for COBOL developers has diminished over time and my sense is that most are doing maintenance work on legacy systems. You weren't at Duke were you, as that's where I learned both MIX (Knuth) and PL/I. Keep in mind that much/most software written for Linux can be easily adapted for MacOS, and so focus on Linux solutions and you likely will find it's available for MacOS as well.Īgree with above on a number of points. The purpose of the course was to expose us to the breadth of computer programming languages. Of those, Cobol is the only one that I never subsequently used. It covered Cobol, Algol, Lisp, Snobol, and APL. In college, I had a small exposure to Cobol, as part of a 'survey of computer languages' course. When I went to college, again, our first language was Mix (Don Knuth's assembly language for a non-existent hardware), and then we learned PL/1.Īpproaching from machine language/assembly first gives a great understanding of the underlying hardware that is lacking in a lot of students today.

They started us out with MACHINE LANGUAGE (IBM 1620 - not even assembly! We punched numerical instructions on cards) before they let is learn Fortran. I was lucky enough to have a computer and computer course in my high school when I graduated in 1972. There is, however, one throwback computer science education practice that I highly endorse. Honestly, if they offer you a choice between Cobol and Java - find another school! And that is a serious answer. EASILY, in fact, as it is not a difficult language.īut, really, not a good thing to base an education on.

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