Once you get into it you’ll wonder how you ever programmed without “divisions”! I mean honestly, just declaring variables anywhere? Who needs that. Give me a nice, defined data division any day 😌
Comment on Not mocking cobol devs but yall are severely underpaid for keeping fintech alive
affiliate@lemmy.world 11 months ago
what i’m gathering from this thread is that i should learn cobol
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
Yeah man, it can’t be worse than JS, right?
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
When this has come up in the past, it’s a lucrative career path, but probably tricky to break in to since nobody’s maintaining a COBOL system they can afford to put into the hands of someone inexperienced.
The dudes earning half a million are able to because they’ve been at it since before their boss was born.
Knusper@feddit.de 11 months ago
Yeah, and from what I understand, learning the language itself isn’t the hard part. It actually has rather few concepts. What’s difficult, is learning how to program a computer correctly without all the abstractions and safety measures that modern languages provide.
Even structured programming had to be added to COBOL in a later revision. That’s if/else, loops and similar.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
It seems that back in the day, people effectively ran a simple compiler by hand on paper. It could work pretty well; Roller Coaster Tycoon was famously written in assembly.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Well, I only wrote simple exercises in Intel assembly in uni, but there were more of those with AVR assembly.
You can structure things nicely and understandably if you want.
It’s an acquired skill just like many others. Just today writing something big fully in assembly is not in demand, so that skill can usually be encountered among embedded engineers or something like that.