this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Until it becomes obsolete, unsupportable, the crux of your operation, and/or the basis for all of your decisions π¬
(Yes, I read the article, itβs just the signs, but yes, the above still applies!)
COBOL has entered the chat
e: good for legacy employment though. A relative of mine is a Z80 programmer by trade, and he can effectively walk into a job because the talent pool is so small now. Granted - the wages are never great but never poor, and the role is maintenance and troubleshooting rather than being on the leading edge of development - but it's a job for life.
Every time I hear about COBOL I feel like I should try to learn it as a backup plan...
I'm in two minds about that. One the one hand, yes, of course - as all the original COBOL folks die off, the skills will be even rarer and thus worth more.
On the other hand, if we keep propping up old shit, the businesses will keep relying on it and it'll be even more painful when they do eventually get forced to migrate off it.
On the other other hand, we know it works, and we don't want to migrate everything into a series of Electron apps just because that's popular at the moment.
Part of the problem is the cost of moving off it. Some companies simply can't pay what that would cost, and that's before you consider the risk.
Tough spot to be in.
You have to unlearn everything you know to learn it, go look its bad.
Let COBOL die, it's terrible.
If it works, why would we want to go through the trouble of switching to another language that will also eventually be regarded as needing to be retired? There's decades of debugging and improvement done on their system, start over with a new system and all that work needs to be done again but with a programming language that's probably much more complex and that leaves the door open to more mistakes...
I'm all for that I just never personally liked COBOL.
It wasn't for me, too wordy and felt more like something for accounting/corporate than a programmer. I was offered a good-paying job programming COBOL out of college but turned it down because I didn't want to spend my life with it. But that's just me.
π₯²
Not to mention when you want to change the entire system it becomes a huge operation and problem.
Massive risk to that change too.
So many people don't understand how risk informs everything a business does.
What cost is there to a given system being down for one hour? A day? Any regulations around it?
Often it's better to pay a known quantity up front than risk potential outages where you can't predict all the downstream affects.
I'd consider those various states of not working. So... Don't fix it if it's not broken!