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COBOL joke from 1999:
A COBOL programmer, tired of all the extra work and chaos caused by the impending Y2K bug, decides to have himself cryogenically frozen for a year so he can skip all of it.
He gets himself frozen, and eventually is woken up when several scientists open his cryo-pod.
"Did I sleep through Y2K? Is it the year 2000?", he asks.
The scientists nervously look at each other. Finally, one of them says "Actually, it's the year 9999. We hear you know COBOL."
I had a job that used COBOL and programmed in it. Its not terrible. It even works with sql.
The issue is the decades of code with little to o documentation, the fixes for issues like y2k that wirked at the time but now have problems, and greedy companies that want you to pay per processor. All the while you yourself are one of three people in the city that are looking to slowly pull everything out of COBOL, making it just a bit harder to get a job next time.
Interesting. My experiences with FORTRAN made me expect the worst.
programming languages pre 2000: have heart and soul
programming languages post 2000: ai and javascript slop that take 80 chromium processes to run and 64gb of memory.
I've been programming in various languages for about 15 years. I'm stuck working on software automation.
how do I transition to COBOL development?
It's easy peasy. Read a tutorial and it's done. Easier than C. Biggest problem with COBOL software is most programs are idioticly huge and have been patched and expanded for decades. Touching anything will break everything. Source: i patched y2k
just to be clear, I want it for getting a job, not just learning how to develop in COBOL.
My father does Cobol programming for banks.
Insurance companies in Des Moines, Iowa, USA tended to be heavy users of COBOL near the year 2000. If you want a job writing COBOL, I suggest looking there. I am sure at this point they will do some training.
year 9999. We hear you know COBOL.
slams cryo-pod door shut
Y10K will be a serious issue when it eventually comes around.
If we survive Y2038...
I intend to be retired for Y2038. I have been warning my younger coworkers that 1. they're going to have to fix it, 2. It's going to be worse than Y2K, and 3. Managers and up are not going to take it seriously because Y2K was mostly a nothing burger (because of a lot of hard work and investment that people forget about).
If we survive Y2026...
Nah it'll be fixed eventually (quote 1970 devs)
Yeah, at they approach 9999 surely they will start using larger variables to store the year, and all of the 2000's code will have moved out of production (2000's and not 1970's because we may have fixed the 1970's code by now.)