Comment on If it ain't broke

Lemjukes@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• brokenlcd@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Like all old systems, do nothing and pray it doesn’t shit itself.

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• Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s too lucrative to die completely, somebody will always be there to take it up.

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  • Lemjukes@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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…

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  • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Supply and demand.

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• daqu@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Somebody has to RTFM :(

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• toofpic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  They are alive, we employ some

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• dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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.

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  • bufalo1973@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The last update in the standard is from 2023 and includes OOP.

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  • lorty@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If you are new it’s probably easy. If you have some experience the roughness of it will drive you mad.

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  • Lemjukes@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Thanks so much for this reply!

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• GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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.

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  • HamsterRage@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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.

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    • emergencybird@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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

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• dactylotheca@suppo.fi ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fr tho what happens when all the COBOL programmers die off?

  Uh, how do you think learning programming languages works exactly?

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• ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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.

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  • Tja@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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.

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• troyunrau@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Niche skills will demand higher salaries. Thus you’ll still get a few that learn it just to enter the niche.

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• LordCrom@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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.

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