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1857
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • if you're looking at web stuff, sure. that market is saturated. i've worked in mining, manufacturing and vehicle industries and they're always looking for people.

  • the market is screaming for talented developers. get in there!

  • you're not going to get a position remote if your client is a bank or some other entity that does cobol. that shit is running on an airgapped machine running a vm of a machine from the 90s running a vm of a machine from the 70s. if you're really unlucky the source will be on punch cards because they didn't invest in a machine with storage and asked the VM developers for the same workflow as before

  • Why is verbosity such a bad thing?

    oh the names aren't long. cobol has keyword alternatives for all operators and all numbers up to 20. since the language was designed for non-programmers, code in the wild follows no paradigm and mixes these alternatives freely. names are usually kept as short as possible.

    there's also a lot of boilerplate required for each file wrt the actual structure of the sections, assembly style. sure most of this can be automated with tooling but there's no tooling available. the cobol people have mainly worked in their own sphere and not been included in the tooling explosion of the last 15 years.

    here's an example of some well-written cobol. most of it is nowhere close to this consistent, or source-controlled for that matter.

    keyword count is a quick but bad metric of language complexity. thanks to all the alternative syntaxes cobol allows, it has around 300 keywords.

  • it doesn't debunk, it raises additional questions. if you're all in, "it's a miracle" is a good enough explanation.

  • for what?

  • good cobol programmers are probably the highest paid programmers there are. mostly because there are so few of them and the systems are so critical.

    but like... it's not going to be fun. cobol as a language is extremely verbose, and you're not going to actually develop anything. it's just fixing compatibility problems and y2k issues all day.

  • Fortran is everywhere. it got a new release less than ten years ago.

  • all of these are still used in modern applications. i suggest Forth.

  • you could just learn cobol. it's not going anywhere, unfortunately

  • my grandparents had one when i was a kid. the wire went through some sort of pulse-to-tone converter box. nostalgia is powerful.

  • platypuses are venomous.

  • the perfect push over the edge for the doubting christian in your life: was Jesus trans or was Mary an adulterer?

  • that's just what it wants you to think

  • yeah no it's not a serious suggestion obviously, the cost is insane. you should get a pilot acquaintance then :)

  • yeah you should get a pilot's license

  • you are allowed to say ass

  • interesting. we had our own well when i grew up, and i've had allergic reactions to chlorinated water before so i'm super sensitive to it. i remember the water tasting off in london and eastern germany but it doesn't at home and it didn't when i visited austria. last time i was in north america and unprepaired for the tap water, it made me gag.