• tisktisk@piefed.social
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    25 days ago

    how to obtain this ‘last person that knows cobol’ title with whatever language goes extinct next?

    • lime!@feddit.nu
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      25 days ago

      you could just learn cobol. it’s not going anywhere, unfortunately

      • mesamune@lemmy.worldOP
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        25 days ago

        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

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
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          24 days ago

          You could most likely find some damn spicy contracts. The real question is, is it worth it?

          You’re going to retrofit some old code to fix an upcoming date bug, or try to make some changes wrapped around security vulnerabilities. But these systems we’re relying on, they’re in banks, air traffic control, and in hospitals, we’re not just depending on these boxes but critically depending on these boxes. There’s almost nobody sitting around to give you a second set of eyes on the code, probably almost nobody capable of doing proper QA on the systems you’re working on.

        • Cort@lemmy.world
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          24 days ago

          I’d bet you will probably work for experience or exposure and very little money on the first job or two you take, since you don’t have any hands on experience. But after that it’s kind of a name your own price gig.

          • tisktisk@piefed.social
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            24 days ago

            I know you’re joking, but it’s one of the only kinds of jobs I can picture motivational enough to pursue

        • lime!@feddit.nu
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          24 days ago

          good cobol programmers are probably the highest paid programmers there are. mostly because there are so few of them and the systems are so critical.

          but like… it’s not going to be fun. cobol as a language is extremely verbose, and you’re not going to actually develop anything. it’s just fixing compatibility problems and y2k issues all day.

          • lime!@feddit.nu
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            25 days ago

            all of these are still used in modern applications. i suggest Forth.

            • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world
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              25 days ago

              I bet there’s still some FORTRAN in use at NASA/JPL.

              Alternatively, I’m pretty sure key parts of Excel were written in x86 assembly. Dunno if that’s still true.

              • xzot746@sh.itjust.works
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                25 days ago

                When I was going to university in the early 90s I was taking computer programming for business administration, COBOL & FORTRAN, could not drop it quick enough. Such an old boring language (never stuck with programming, maybe they’re all like that).

                Bunch of my class mates did pretty well with the whole Y2K issue though.

              • lime!@feddit.nu
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                24 days ago

                Fortran is everywhere. it got a new release less than ten years ago.

          • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
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            24 days ago

            I doubt it. It’s still used in a whole lot of medical and banking applications where there’s a lot of text manipulation since it’s really good at that (HL7 and other EDI stuff for instance).

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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          24 days ago

          Right. At least 70%. I’ve heard it estimated as high as 97%.

          And it’s losing popularity with new development, (and with new developers) while WordPress, Drupal and WikiMedia are everywhere.

          Perfect recipe to be the next Cobol.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      24 days ago

      Probably no longer possible now that we have generative AI, a coder can now be archived alongside the codebase itself.

      • Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        I know devs writing in it making over 200k per year. Ai isn’t that useful unless you can correct for it’s mistakes, which requires some experience with the language.

        Maybe in another 10 years.

      • stochastictrebuchet@sh.itjust.works
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        24 days ago

        GenAI coding assistants are only as good as the data they are trained on. Less-used proglangs make up a tiny fraction of the available data, or may even be completely absent. There is a reason coding assistants give convincing results with Python and JS/TS, but underperform even on relatively up-and-coming langs like Rust.