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Infinite Loop (programming.dev)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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 8 months ago

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

[-] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 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.

this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
1339 points (99.4% liked)

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