The next thing you know, FEMA will start abducting those COBOL programmers and routing them to states where Trump wants favors.
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I’m learning COBOL, right now!
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And yet it still sounds way better than working with toxic techbros.
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I‘ve seen both, and both of them suck, but in different ways.
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I bet there’s a discount on Cobol programming books and courses at the store right now. Might as well learn something useful.
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If ‘the store’ means BBShop then I’ll pass, thanks. I still have some old COBOL text books from way back when, though.
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Sure, any programmer can learn COBOL, but only masochists will, and there just aren’t enough masochists.
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Sure great idea. Find yourself in a bad situation with a proven, if shaky, system so you start patching in the middle of the situation and try to do repairs which will be untested and just hope that it will get better. This is like deciding that after your ship sank you didn’t like the design of the lifeboat so you tear it apart and rebuild it while floating in it.
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This is one of the main things I remember about COBOL: friends learning programming way back in my day (in kind of the last days of COBOL being taught as a standard thing) just haated it. This was also the early days of people starting to think that the language was soon on its way out, and according to anyone I knew who was an aspiring student programmer who’d had any contact with it, its demise couldn’t come soon enough. So the sacrifice goes beyond maybe having to work for a type of suit that one finds more annoying than others.
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Yeah and don’t forget the full stop at the end. Bad things happen if you don’t. Its like commas in fortran.
When I learned cobol at college, my non-coding friends loved the look of cobol code. It is designed to be human readable as much as possible, for english speakers anyway.
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“so let’s hope there’s documentation”
Were there were eight shelves of three ring binders, but it was all thrown out when Milton’s basement office flooded.
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Sorry but the latest releases of IBM stuff do support git, there are companies who provide automated testing. The architecture can’t be too fucked up - the OS doesn’t crash, and it runs hundreds or thousands of concurrent users. And your bank account.
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9/11 was 20 years ago. The PDP-8 was 55.
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I expect that a lot of those turn-of-the-century mainframes will still be running in another 20 years.
The PDP8 isn’t what’s eating into current mainframe sales, much. I think that’s mostly more recent machines.
It seems especially optimistic given the time typically required to come up to speed on a complex software system and actually be able to do more good than harm, even if you have the correct background. If you even have in-house knowledge remaining you’ll be training them for some time; if not they’ll be doing archaeology on their own for even longer; so having someone pop by for a weekend to do some good won’t do any good. You pretty much need to motivate people to make your problem their problem full time for a nontrivial period of time for it to be worth doing.
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I learned it at college and cobol was a bit too meh to really hate on. Its not like prolog which you either love or hate. I suppose having to spell expressions out is not the best way to code, but then we have IDEs which could do that for you these days.
More recently I have heard that Java is the new cobol and has supplanted it as the new business language. And the java ecosystem is more insidious and harmful than anything related to cobol.
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Hey man, I just remember the attitudes of the people I knew. Arguing with me about it isn’t going to retroactively change their clearly-remembered reactions.
I couldn’t identify a line of COBOL as opposed to any other language; I was an arts guy with friends studying in STEM-y fields that I knew through the whole “being into science fiction” thing. But they were definitely not fond of it for whatever reason, though some of the criticisms in the other comments here sound vaguely familiar.
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Imagine how much trouble they’ll be in when it rolls over to COVID-00.
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Oh thats still years away. No need to worry about that right now. Carry on.
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