It’s too lucrative to die completely, somebody will always be there to take it up.
Comment on If it ain't broke
Lemjukes@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Fr tho what happens when all the COBOL programmers die off?
Supervisor194@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Lemjukes@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I have some experience and no formal training. If I dove into cobol classes and certs would that alone be enough for potential employers? Not in a get rich quick kind of way, but more of a ‘what’s the fastest way I can become attractive to employers without having to go back for a degree cause my current career is falling apart and I need to transition to something that isn’t actively injuring my body.” Kind of way…
kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Supply and demand.
daqu@feddit.org 7 months ago
Somebody has to RTFM :(
toofpic@lemmy.world 7 months ago
They are alive, we employ some
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 7 months ago
TL;DR: it’s probably not that hard to pick up compared to the complex and deep stacks we use today.
COBOL is in a special place in our computing legacy. It’s too new to require intimate knowledge of the electronics that drive it (older systems and machine-code did), and is too old to be all that complicated (target machines were much smaller and slower). I would wager it’s actually not that hard to learn, and is probably a dream to code with modern equipment. You won’t be slowed down by punchcards, tape drives, time sharing, etc., and can probably use VSCode and an emulator to cover a ton of ground. The computing model is likely a straight line (storage -> compute -> storage), with little to no UI. In other words: simple by today’s standards.
bufalo1973@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
The last update in the standard is from 2023 and includes OOP.
lorty@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
If you are new it’s probably easy. If you have some experience the roughness of it will drive you mad.
Lemjukes@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Thanks so much for this reply!
GBU_28@lemm.ee 7 months ago
New folks are learning it. Obviously not in droves, and obviously there is a lot of legacy knowledge, but new people are def training on it.
HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
COBOL is not hard to learn. But it takes years to develop the muscles in your fingers to the point where you can write a subroutine in a single session.
emergencybird@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I took courses in uni for COBOL and you’re right, the language itself isn’t difficult, it’s honestly a lot like writing plain Englisch but making sure your JCL was correct, checking I think it was the spool in order to make sure your jobs were working correctly, reading memory dumps, it was a ride. I love mainframe but it feels like all jobs mainframe ask for 5+ years experience
dactylotheca@suppo.fi 7 months ago
Fr tho what happens when all the COBOL programmers die off?
Uh, how do you think learning programming languages works exactly?
ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
People think there’s job security in this, but there’s really not. I have been called in to replace archaic code with more modern/easier to read code.
It pays very well.
And there have been companies that are paying millions to a small firm to rewrite their COBOL software that covers the same feature set but also opens the door to extendability.
Tja@programming.dev 7 months ago
It really depends on management. Some companies don’t mind paying IBM for new mainframes just to avoid any risks touching it, others are desperate to “break the monolith” and migrate from COBOL to something modern… like Java8. You win some, you lose some.
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Niche skills will demand higher salaries. Thus you’ll still get a few that learn it just to enter the niche.
LordCrom@lemmy.world 7 months ago
They will unfreeze my head 1000 years from now like Futurama.
Upon waking, scientists will welcome me to the future world…
… Then ask if I wouldn’t mind making a change to a COBOL app still in use by the gov.
brokenlcd@feddit.it 7 months ago
Like all old systems, do nothing and pray it doesn’t shit itself.