Posted on 08/20/2020 7:44:40 AM PDT by 11th_VA
I didn’t listen. “Learn COBOL, Drill,” they sez, “it’ll still be viable a half century from now when people are carrying little computers in their pockets and cooking with radar sets.” Stupidest thing I ever heard, I sez. I’ll be a prune at that point, I sez. (Sound of sobbing)
The decision to run COBOL and the like an not modernizing is usually an upper management decision, not the IT group.
This. I’ll add “and/or they enjoy getting paid to do effectively nothing, while convincing management they’re essential”.
I have dabbled in other languages...C#,VB.net,JDE ERP,...even did a little SQLServer DBA...but like Corleone...”they kepp pulling me back!” Best money I am making now is doing the RPG. I am currently building a whole new app set to replace old SYS36 RPG/OCL...
COBOL isn’t the problem with 50 year old COBOL systems.
The fifty years of spaghetti code, missing documentation, poor architecting, workarounds and edge cases due to mergers and acquisitions, and just general bad decisions piled onto the original system is the problem. That’s what you pay for, a programmer who can get in that crazy mindset and be patient enough to work through it. The COBOL skill is almost a trivial part of it.
So you’re not guilty of the “charge”, but I know some old, COBOL especially, programmers, usually for government, who passed on about three generations of skills updates, were in a precarious position for a number of years—and now are sitting pretty!
Make it stop! Wait! I can get paid?
After they got past Y2K, they are good to go until the end of the century. One can’t say that about the fad languages that come and go.
Nope, IT Leadership has proved themselves completely ineffectual for a lot of years. The same people just talk lingo mumbo-jumbo and their correspondence reads like sales brochures.
There are so, so many ways to sell this with a 5 year expense return and it’s all gravy from there on out. They just refuse to act.
Their current crisis speaks for itself.
It’s been interesting to watch over the last few years as the trend has been away from desktop computing to mainframes (they call them ‘servers’ now) with the desktop being little more than the equivalent of a DEC VT100 terminal (but with color).
Still waiting for desktop punch card machines so we can go back to that.
The worst piece of code I had to maintain was given to me by a very ‘bright’ and clever programmer that used to modify OP codes in assembler.
... year 2000. All those date fields with just two digits.
Isn’t COBOL more secure because today’s hackers don’t know the language?
I’m holding out for paper tape, and drum memory. Vacuum tubes are making a comeback, but primarily in audio”phile” equipment.
100%
Maybe that is what is wrong with the state of Nevada Unemployment system.
It still isn’t sending out funds.
Friend filed on March 26 or so.
Hasn’t received a dime.
The average COBOL programmer is like, what, 65 years old now?
It’s more secure because it does not directly run on the internet. It’s generally accessed there by UI programs written in Java.
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