Comment on Not mocking cobol devs but yall are severely underpaid for keeping fintech alive
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months agoWhen 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.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
Is there a tutorial you could recommend? I’m actually pretty curious how exactly you would go about that now.