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Some people know it, and they make obscene salaries with their knowledge.
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Programming
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For non-video people like me: The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore
The real headline behind it: IBM plans to update COBOL with Watson to Java.
This is delicious. I hope they hurry up, and I hope they do it in a really large really public context.
I've had this conversation, but today's generation of AI won't:
"No, I can't just do a one for one translation. Some of the core operating principles of the language are different, and the original intent needs to be well understood to make the appropriate translation choice. If I just translate it one to one, with no understanding of the business context. you're going to suffer from years off debugging subtle but impactful bugs."
Get on with it IBM. Let's light this dumpster fire so we can all bask together in it's glow (and smell).
There may be a day coming in the next 100-1000 years when a learning algorithm is a suitable replacement for an expert engineer, but that day has not arrived (and the early evidence of that impending arrival hasn't arrived, either. I haven't seen evidence of AGI experiments with even toddler reasoning levels, so far. Toddler level reasoning wil come before AGI with infrastructure deployment skills, which itself is probably coming before AGI with expert business logic diagnostic skills. This could all be 20 years or 1000 years away. But we will probably see LLMs running deeply insightful life changing management workshops sometime roughly next week, since a trained parrot could do that. If we have an AGI that can meaningfully reason with small numbers in the next 20 years, we will be making great progress and on track for the rest to arrive - someday. If not, then we're probably waiting on a missing computational breakthrough.)
At Uni doing CompSci in the mid 1980s, we were told the likes of Cobol was dead, and we were taught Pascal :)
Cobol is dead.
And I think it's about time to start telling people Java and Perl are dead, so they can marvel at how much Cobol and Java and Perl are still doing in production after death.
They're not dead, they're alive and actively doing work. People want to change that and move on to a better dystopia.
It's dead in a similar way to Latin where nobody learns it as a first language. Everyone who learns it does so for a specific purpose.
In Canada there are large organizations (including many in the government) who subsidize college courses on Cobol just to be able to get some fresh talent to learn it. In some cases they'll pay the tuition for the course entirely. Huge systems at the center of critical government functions still depend on Cobol .
"Java/Cobol is dead like Latin"
I love that. I'm going to steal it.
Edit: And I acknowledge that when I say that about Java, I'm just trying to wind people up. Java is losing popularity fast, but is still a pretty common first language.
Can remote non-citizens apply? Asking for a friend.
I took a Pascal class in Junior High summer school. I thought it was very weird compared to BASIC.
They could probably tweak Watson to turn Cobol into Pascal.
Maintaining old code is the real drawback. Surely nobody finds that fun.
COBOL is just the turd on the shit cake.
Pay me to do it remotely and I'll jump at the chance
Friend of mine maintains COBOL for an insurance company. He lives on the opposite side of the country from his business, and is only on call one weekend a month.
Dude got hired before he even graduated, getting paid 70k, and gets to live wherever he wants.
I would kill for that lol
70k is likely way underpaid for dealing with COBOL. I've heard of people making 200k for being on-call
Yep I worked in insurance and COBOL. Mostly getting it out of COBOL. Working remote is so nice! I'm hybrid right now it's excellent.
I always wonder if I should just learn COBOL and try to just do a few juicy contracts a year and focus on my other pursuits (farming and considering making a game, as well as vacation of course) the rest of the year.
Just knowing the language isn't enough to make the obscene money. You have to also be very familiar with the systems that use the language, and that takes years.
I have domain knowledge for some usages at least, and worked on things that were converted fairly recently from COBOL and places that still had AS/400 and such in use. I am aware I would need experience (beyond personal) before any real money would be there.
Try it out! Being a self taught programmer is incredibly rewarding.
I wouldn't recommend it. I actually looked up COBOL jobs a while ago, and while they paid more, it was only like 20% more - not enough to make it worth it IMO.
I live and work in Japan where dev salaries are much lower so, if I could just get a contract gig in USD, that would be pretty big for me especially with 1usd being 150 JPY or more
My friend's mom gets called back for COBOL stints at major US banks all the time. I don't know how long it'll last, but apparently the list of people to select from and bring in is ridiculously short.
how can you realistically enter that list?
its not like they bring in just anyone that learns it i guess?
I'll have to ask, she worked as a COBOL contractor for multiple banks historically so it might be one of those "who you know" type things. I'll circle back and reply here if I hear anything.
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Still on my to-learn list.
I learned on gnucobol. I believe it was updated to opencobol at some point.
how to obtain this 'last person that knows cobol' title with whatever language goes extinct next?
Vba
I'm a vba wizard, do not tempt me into waiting until it's at the state of cobol
you could just learn cobol. it's not going anywhere, unfortunately
As someone who has worked with it, it's not too bad. Lots of $$ if you know someone.
The biggest issue (that she goes into), is the lack of context. Why is the thing doing what it is doing is the hardest part
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