A COBOL programmer, tired of all the extra work and chaos caused by the impending Y2K bug, decides to have himself cryogenically frozen for a year so he can skip all of it.

He gets himself frozen, and eventually is woken up when several scientists open his cryo-pod.

"Did I sleep through Y2K? Is it the year 2000?", he asks.

The scientists nervously look at each other. Finally, one of them says "Actually, it's the year 9999. We hear you know COBOL."

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[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 66 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

For real, I should just teach myself cobol and have a guaranteed sequence of jobs for life

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 35 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

The language itself is not hard. It's reading other people's code written in it that is hard.

So basically like any other programming language.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 16 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah and I’ve got near on two decades of experience, so I think it’s worth a shot lol

[–] ugo@feddit.it 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I bet it has better dependency management / fewer ecosystem issues than C++, somehow

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

As someone who knows COBOL, I'd say, don't bother. People over exaggerate the availability and remuneration of COBOL jobs. Maybe they used to be well paid or there used to be lots of jobs, but it's pretty much a myth these days.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Well is that because everyone thinks they can get CodeGen to rewrite their COBOL stack and are gonna need someone to un-fuck their codebase in a few years? Because if so, that sounds like a great reason to learn COBOL.

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I doubt LLMs are being used much for COBOL, if anything it'll be used in a "replace this COBOL with Java". COBOL is used as legacy code and most of it has already been rewritten in Java.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago

raises OOM exception

[–] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

You would also get the best job title ever: "Chief Codebase Unfucker"

[–] lorty@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 weeks ago

COBOL itself isn't really that bad. It's the lack of modern toolling you'd expect that will make you tear your hair apart. And also JCL. Fuck JCL.

[–] astropenguin5@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

I've thought about this many times lol

[–] jimmy90@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

there will be lots of systems in shit old languages being nursed along because nobody dare rewrite them because the engineering is so awful

take your pick

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 weeks ago

~~because the engineering is so awful~~

because the engineering was perfect and nobody has had to touch it since it was written

Seriously, that’s why bank stuff still has COBOL stacks. It’s worked perfectly for like half a century.