Good morning,
You can call me Joshua, or sublimonym. I've communicated some with
aoirthoir over the last week, and I'm interesting in helping out with
the documentation efforts for add1tocobol / openCOBOL.
I would be in the category of new to COBOL. I'd like to get familiar
with the language for personal and professional reasons. I'm mostly new
to Unix / Linux as well. I am however good at understanding technical
stuff and then explaining it in plain English. If you want the broader
story, you can read the post-script at your leisure.
My initial offer and goal is to help produce some orientation and
how-to guides for people (like me) who are just figuring out how to get
set up with both openCOBOL and the language itself. This would include,
initially:
1. What is openCOBOL (translator to C for subsequent compilation?)
2. How to actually install a monster work-in-progress tarball with
lots of dependencies.
3. How to set up VIM so you can start writing COBOL programs with a
modicum of highlighting / etc.
4. Basic syntax of COBOL.
Sound good?
I reviewed the record of this past Sunday's meeting, and it looks like
btiffin / Brian is the champion-nominee for this effort. So heads up
and hello to him, and I look forward to helping out on this.
I'm set up on FREENODE and the openCOBOL forum as sublimonym.
Thanks,
Joshua Honig
(sublimonym)
PS: The longer story
My background for context:
I'm actually a young fella with only moderate programming experience,
none of it in COBOL. I'm a financial information systems specialist at
a big accounting firm. Forgive me...most of my time is spent doing
audits of financial information systems.
Anyway, I've found it absolutely remarkable how much (90%+ it seems) of
financial transactions processing in the real world occurs specifically
on IBM zSeries computers (aka Mainframes). And most of the logic is
written in COBOL and IBM-JCL. Inside the various organizations I audit,
both MFs and COBOL are surrounded, organizationally, by a mysterious,
impenetrable shroud. The attitude, and I'm sure a lot of the tech
people are happy to perpetuate it, is that MF administration and COBOL
programming are beyond the grasp of the ordinary human mind. So let the
tech wizards handle it, don't ask questions, and all will be well.
I'm not a huge fan of auditing, actually. I'm far more interested in a)
helping tech people, their managers, and their companies' leadership
manage, use, and control financial information systems better, b)
teaching people in general about IS, c) furthering the best-practices
and best-tools front from the nitty-gritty technical side. My pipe
dream would be to develop a brand new platform from the ground up
that's logically impenetrable (from a security standpoint) but so easy
to use and understand that elementary school classrooms could do an
adopt-a-utility and contribute some code to the kernel. :)
With that said, the immediate talent I definitely have, and have to
contribute to the projects at hand, is the ability to understand the
technical nitty-gritty and then describe it in plain English. The
add1tocobol mission seems very well aligned with my own interests in
this regard: spreading the word on a widely-used but little-understood
programming language. As explained above, I became so interested in
COBOL precisely because I found in the 'field' that it is both widely
used (and not about to go away) and little understood.
I also love the idea of the openCOBOL project. I found openCOBOL
yesterday precisely because I was desperately trying to find a COBOL
compiler that I could use on my Linux laptop, without calling a sales
rep at Micro Focus. I better not get started on IBM and the attendant
powers that be...suffice to say that the more I learn about zSeries
computers and the various software / code associated with them (COBOL,
IBM-JCL, ACF2 / RACF, z/OS...) the more angry and grumpy I get about
IBM's profoundly opposite-of-open-source attitude. They seem to keep
their business going by preventing the spread of knowledge;
perpetuating the idea that COBOL / z/OS / CICS / ACF* / etc are holy
mysteries to be dispensed only at official ($$$) IBM
trainings...arrggg...enough said.
So, yeah. I'm really interested in both the add1tocobol (education) and
openCOBOL (nitty-gritty) aspects of this project. And with
documentation being such a hot topic and definite need (which I
emphatically attest to as a brand-new COBOL-interested person), I think
that's a place I could help out. If nothing else because I myself need
some more concrete guidance. And per Socrates, teaching is the bast way
to learn.
Well, I need to head to work 15 minutes ago. Thanks again for your time
and response. Over the next couple days I'll check in a little more
detail on what I might be able to help with. My immediate idea would be
helping assemble a first-time COBOL programming guide that's free,
available, and understandable. This would be a unique situation where
knowing almost nothing about COBOL would make me highly qualified to
help develop and evaluate whether it makes sense to a newbie :)