by thomas_w_bowman » Mon Sep 20, 2004 5:09 am
Java would be a good starting language, and C++ is an efficient language - which gives you enough control to really gum things up if/when you miss a detail.
PC Programming for fun, C++ might be a good tool - remember to make some notes about what you are trying to do, try to put common functions into callable routines to avoid the sprawl of redundant coding. Planning makes coding easier.
In the next 4-5 years there will be a shortage of Mainframe COBOL Programmers - the market will be seeking those with PC/Network/Mainframe skills and some Business understanding(Accounting would be good for Mainframe work). We suffer from a myth that Mainframes are "Dinosaurs" about to become extinct - but the truth is that they will not go away for applications with very large customer bases (Govt. [IRS/Medicare/Medicaid/USDA Crop Insurance}, Insurance [especially Medical, where complexity will increase also], Banking [Mortgages and loans, Checking/plastic, and E-Commerce to some extent], and large scale retailing [Target collects store data on servers, which send the data to the Corp. Mainframes, for example]). I have seen attempts to move these applications to servers, they fail for various reasons (Stability, Integrity, Channel capacity, ease of maintenance and testing, ease of growth) and ended up back on the Mainframes. These are the industrys that Mainframes were built for in the first place, in the later 1950's - many other applications are best on servers (email, POS, shared management functions planning/tracking/specifying/Budgets/workstation control). COBOL training may be difficult to find (in the USA, not in India), and even in an extreme outsourcing scenario, testing function is least likely to be outsourced (we want to assure that the outsourced code is working as it should and will be hesitant to simply trust outsourced developers to do final acceptance testing for us).