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COBOL joke from 1999:
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."
For real, I should just teach myself cobol and have a guaranteed sequence of jobs for life
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.
Yeah and I’ve got near on two decades of experience, so I think it’s worth a shot lol
I bet it has better dependency management / fewer ecosystem issues than C++, somehow
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.
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.
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.
raises OOM exception
You would also get the best job title ever: "Chief Codebase Unfucker"
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.
I've thought about this many times lol
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
~~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.
If you ever plan to kidnap a COBOL developer, make sure to offer their employer a "double-rate same day delivery option" in the ransom.
I feel like I have seen multiple such fight memes from this restaurant. What is going on there? Are they ok?
It's a meme video, there is an altercation in a McDonald's, loud and violent, but the guy in the foreground continues eating completely nonplussed with big capybara energy about the punch-up going on next to him.
I think I have seen versions from the same restaurant but another person sitting calmly. But maybe I am wrong
Our COBOL based system has MAXDATE = 31 Dec 9999
I tried to set a reference year to 9999 to temporarily disable a thing, but a mid-range system couldn't handle it, we had to use 2099
Now I'm almost considering learning the language