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You may want to check out Mark Dominus's excellent article about his experience teaching Perl to COBOL prorammers.

As an ex-COBOL programmer, myself, I have posted a couple of nodes about this subject:

These may give you some insight on how to proceed. However, I wouldn't show my nodes to COBOL programmers. They are not terribly flattering to the COBOL language.

Update: After reading jcwren's reply, I realize that I should have paid more attention to the "operator" variable. At an insurance company that I worked for, we had a few operators who were very good at being operators, but made a disastrous transition to programming.

One, in particular, caused us nightmares. I was one of the maintainers of a mainframe financial software package called IVIS. Normally, when the IVIS system would run out of memory, it would generate what is called a SOC-7 error. Unfortunately, this typically indicates a type-mismatch instead of an out of memory error. Somehow, this operator got it through his head that all he needed to do was "fix" our bad data. Then he would rerun these hideously complicated jobs and cause massive data corruption that would often take us days to fix.

Finally, we had to take the drastic step of not allowing any operators to touch our system, resulting in our getting pages at 3:00 AM when the system went down. We preferred this to having to work overtime for the next several days to make up for his inability to comprehend that sometimes you need to look beyond the surface.

Eventually, he became a Lotus Notes programmer and was put in charge of creating an application to manage our change control process. After a couple of months, he was demoted back to operator when the new change control process pretty much shut down the programmer's productivity.

Reluctantly, I must agree with jcwren. Assess this person's ability to even be a programmer. Just because you can fix a car doesn't mean you can design one.

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to (Ovid) RE: I need a bit of mentoring advice by Ovid
in thread I need a bit of mentoring advice by mpennucci

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