Hey, I know a lot of COBOL developers and, on average, the last change the code they are working on happened just 20 years ago!
Some people know it, and they make obscene salaries with their knowledge.
no, they don’t
how to obtain this ‘last person that knows cobol’ title with whatever language goes extinct next?
you could just learn cobol. it’s not going anywhere, unfortunately
Like could I learn it enough to obtain a real job tho? That pays real money I mean?
You could most likely find some damn spicy contracts. The real question is, is it worth it?
You’re going to retrofit some old code to fix an upcoming date bug, or try to make some changes wrapped around security vulnerabilities. But these systems we’re relying on, they’re in banks, air traffic control, and in hospitals, we’re not just depending on these boxes but critically depending on these boxes. There’s almost nobody sitting around to give you a second set of eyes on the code, probably almost nobody capable of doing proper QA on the systems you’re working on.
Every attempt at dissuading me only makes the fun of the challenge more enticing.
None of this matters as I have no work experience–only hobby crafting.
My point is that there will always be people willing to try and the more you tell us “you don’t want to” the more us not so privileged with work-experience continue dreaming with deeper allureOh, I’m not trying to talk you out of it, I’m just making sure that you see all sides of the scenario.
I looked at some of the Y2K patches, I don’t strictly know cobol either , but it’s not that hard to read.
You’d think that code lying around would be refined as they had limits on space and everything was so mature. It’s still pretty trashy :)
At Uni doing CompSci in the mid 1980s, we were told the likes of Cobol was dead, and we were taught Pascal :)
Cobol is dead.
And I think it’s about time to start telling people Java and Perl are dead, so they can marvel at how much Cobol and Java and Perl are still doing in production after death.
I always wonder if I should just learn COBOL and try to just do a few juicy contracts a year and focus on my other pursuits (farming and considering making a game, as well as vacation of course) the rest of the year.
Eevee’s heteroglot entry for COBOL is interesting, coming from … practically anything else.
There’s also someone doing AOC in ABAP (basically SAP COBOL) who posts over in the AOC subreddit. I’ve looked at them and … mhm, I know some of these words!
I’ve fallen down the rabbithole. I’m reading a free course (from 2001ish) on Cobol.
COBOL is Maintainable
I now question everything. I mean, technically, basically anything is maintainable in that it’s possible…
I mean, the fact that more than half-century-old COBOL continues to be maintained does speak to the fact that it is maintainable. That might also be part of what makes COBOL painful to the average developer: You’re not only dealing with a language that first appeared in 1959, designed for machines that were very different than modern computers; you’re also dealing with over a half century of legacy code, including all that means for Hyrum’s law.
Unfortunately maintainable and pleasant to work with are rather distinct concepts.
