• embix@feddit.de
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    10 months ago

    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    There are a lot of employers that’ll throw good money at you for maintaining and extending their outdated crap.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?

    • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      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!

      • JohnnyCanuck
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        10 months ago

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

        • CanadaPlus@futurology.today
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          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.