I am a member of this forum because I must deal with COBOL code and  deliverables for work.  I'm sure I'll find many answers to my engineer's questions, here, once all the OpenText forum content is transmorgified over to this site.  In the interim, please consider the following - apologies in advance if this is duplicitous, once the OpenText forum content is loaded into this forum.

My daughter has taken an interest in Rocket COBOL, in hopes of getting a paying gig/job working with COBOL.  How is a young person suppose to learn a Rocket COBOL, write programs, compile, test, etc. outside an academic environment  if you don't provide any sort of free personal/non-commercial licensing?  Far too many companies post job listenings requiring ten years experience from newly minted college grads.  That won't happen, of course; but these young people may be able to gain some certifications if there were some path to follow that didn't increase their already high academic dept.

The Learn COBOL Visual Studio Code extension, by Rocket, claims to allow a person to compile, run, debug, etc. COBOL code; but digging deeper into these claims we find that is  does not allow for anything but superficial code editing; and there is no COBOL language server, compiler, runtime, debugger, etc.  behind this extension  without a co-located, installed,  and licensed Rocket product - i.e. one of the Enterprise Developer or Development Hub variants.

IBM courses on CourseRA.org are defunct - no surprise.  But GNUCobol is participating in Google's Summer of Code 2024 and appears poised to eat Rocket's lunch.

Owing to the fact that Rocket just closed their purchase of Visual COBOL from OpenText, I would hope Rocket is prepared to step up and help young people learn COBOL so they can help keep that mountain of COBOL in the real world  functioning properly.

Selfishly, I become apoplectic at the thought of fork-lifting all of my organization's VisualCOBOL code over to GNUCobol.  It would be easier and more cost effective to re-write it all in some modern, sane language such as Clojure or Julia.

Thoughts?

Hi Tim,

The absence of the Visual COBOL Personal Edition is a temporary one. We are migrating the OpenText sites to Rocket and that one is still on the to-do list.

The Learn COBOL extension for VSCode is different than the COBOL Extension for VSCode. The COBOL Extension depends upon a licensed copy of Visual COBOL being installed in order to compile and debug your code. The Learn COBOL extension, when installed into VSCode will download and install a special version of the compiler called Community Edition, which will allow you to compile and debug your code without having a licensed copy of Visual COBOL installed.

This can be found in the Microsoft Marketplace here.