Programmer Humor

19594 readers

977 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

Keep content in english
No advertisements
Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1293

Infinite Loop (programming.dev)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

67 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

all other employers demand modern technologies

There are a lot of employers that'll throw good money at you for maintaining and extending their outdated crap. Have you ever considered learning COBOL?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

No wonder COBOL programmers are paid a lot, because what would be a 1-liner for "hello world" in other languages looks like this in Cobol:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. IDSAMPLE.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    DISPLAY 'HELLO WORLD'.
    STOP RUN.

This is already $6000 worth of code right there!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wonder how much open source COBOL is out there for LLMs to harvest.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The thing people always overlook is that these legacy systems are only still running because they're super important. Nobody's hiring a junior COBOL dev to maintain NORAD, and hopefully nobody's contemplating putting ChatGPT in charge either.

The move if you want this kind of job is to learn a language that's not quite a dinosaur yet, and have 20 years experience in 20 years. Perl or PHP maybe.