[nfbcs] [Fwd: Article on COBOL - Computerworld]

[Aaron Cannon]

Hi all.

First off, this response doesn't answer the question, but it does
comment on a closely related point.

I believe that far too much emphasis is placed on what programming
language is learned by students.  While it makes sense to learn a
language that will be useful in a career, it's much more important to
learn how to program.  I believe that a person can have memorized the
entire syntax of a language and even write a lot of code in that
language but still not know how to program, or at least not know how
to program well.

Likewise, I would also submit that it is not as important what
programming languages a person knows as long as they know how to
program.  Once you understand the different styles of programming,
picking up a new language is usually the work of a few long weekends
with some fat books and writing a bunch of code.  Now, that's not to
say that experience with a particular programming language is
meaningless.  Quite the contrary.  However, I do think it tends to be
quite over rated, in comparison to the skill of the programmer.

Were I creating a resume, I would likely claim experience with c, PHP,
Python, and JavaScript, with some familiarity with C++, c#,
ActionScript, Objective C, Java, Visual Basic, and Perl.  Why?
Because it is a nice long list that seems impressive, and because it's
the truth.  However, It's also mostly meaningless.  If I were to hire
a programmer, I would want to know less about what they program in and
more about how they program.  Is there code clean and readable?  Does
it follow best practices?  Are they using the features of the language
properly and consistently?  Of course, it's easiest to hire someone
who already knows the language you want to use, but a good programmer
is a good programmer, and learning good programming is hard, while
learning more languages is comparatively easy.

My advice to students would be to pick your program of study
carefully.  Also, don't depend on your school to make you a good
programmer, no matter how highly rated the school is.  They should
hopefully give you some good direction on such matters, but if you
want to really learn to be a programmer, you'll need to do most of it
on your own by first and foremost programming, but also by reading and
understanding other people's code.  Getting involved in an open source
project and fixing some bugs is a great way to do this.

Avoid classes with titles like "introduction to Programming in X" in
favor of classes like "Computer Algorithms" "Exploring Data
Structures", "Functional Programming", "Object Oriented Programming"
or any classes that teach you how to program in teams.  Also, classes
on probability and statistics and databases have proven very useful in
my career.

These are just some things I have been thinking about for a while.

I'll be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.

Aaron

On 4/20/12, Leslie Fairall <fairall at shellworld.net> wrote:
> Hi Tracy:
>
> From a rehab counselor's perspective, I didn't realize that COBOL was
> still in demand. What training institutions still offer it?
>
> --
> New Gingrich for paychecks--Barack Obama for food stamps. It's your
> decision!
>
>
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