Programmer Humor

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Infinite Loop (programming.dev)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 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There are a lot of employers that'll throw good money at you for maintaining and extending their outdated crap.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 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.