For non-video people like me: The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore
The real headline behind it: IBM plans to update COBOL with Watson to Java.
At Uni doing CompSci in the mid 1980s, we were told the likes of Cobol was dead, and we were taught Pascal :)
Maintaining old code is the real drawback. Surely nobody finds that fun.
COBOL is just the turd on the shit cake.
Still on my to-learn list.
The world’s not too bright, then, is it?
🤷
I always wonder if I should just learn COBOL and try to just do a few juicy contracts a year and focus on my other pursuits (farming and considering making a game, as well as vacation of course) the rest of the year.
I wouldn’t recommend it. I actually looked up COBOL jobs a while ago, and while they paid more, it was only like 20% more - not enough to make it worth it IMO.
I live and work in Japan where dev salaries are much lower so, if I could just get a contract gig in USD, that would be pretty big for me especially with 1usd being 150 JPY or more
I don’t know if this is realistic. Considering making a game is a full time job.
This isn’t true. If you can get by while working part-time, you still have at least 40 hours every two weeks to work on your game.
It’s one of my biggest regrets, that after school I immediately jumped into full-time job, even though I realistically could live comfortably with 1/3 of the pay I was getting, since young+no familly+no car+shared living reduces your living costs by a very large margin. My best friend did that and has been working only 2 days per week since. I was trying to keep up with him, working on our game in my free time, but it’s simply not feasible to build on top of 40 hours per week of regular job, and then do anything meaningful on your side projects. I barely struggled to get myself to do at least 20h of work per month on the project, missing deadlines, and it sucked.
He, on the other hand, kept our game project afloat and moving forward, with 60+ hours per month, while also writing and running a large LARP for 100 of players, directing his own theater group, and in general successfully working on a lot of projects, including several smaller games.
The best advice I can give, if you want to be a game developer, is to 1) not work in gamedev and 2) work part-time. The IT salary should net you a comfortable life even on part-time pay, assuming it’s not gamedev. Smaller studios will have difficulties keeping afloat if they need to pay you, and in larger AAA studio you will be the same code-monkey crunching JIRA tickets as you would be in any IT job, but for a lot less money. And the design freedom you get when your livelyhood doesn’t depend on your art’s success, be it games or anything else, is totally worth it.
For example, this game has been developed solely in free time, without anyone getting paid for working on it. It’s not AAA and the development takes a long time, but it definitely doesn’t need to be a fulltime job.
You probably dodged a bullet there, thinking you can “just make a game” with a polish that makes it playable. It is a skill you have to learn, several actually. You can learn that if you work in the gamedev industry so I don’t understand why you recommend against it.
Taking x time off to make a game with low knowledge could be a fun endeavour but not more than hiking IMO.
Source: ancient gamedev
I forgot to add that I had a Masters in Game Development and Computer Graphics, which definitely helped, but I still learned most of my gamedev skills by regularly attending gamejams and working on my own projects. I’ve also started working in gamedev for the past year, and I wouldn’t say that it teaches you much, since you are missing out on 80% of actuall development and only crunch JIRA tickets and bugfixes, as a junior that is, without being exposed to the more important parts or other skills. Assuming you join a larger studio with game in progress, in an indie studio with team of 10 people, you’ll probably have a lot more responsibilities and impact on other stages of the game’s development.
It won’t be my first and I’m not going super ambitious or AAA. If it takes me 5 years to do it, that’s fine.
I wrote my first game in straight C with no laptop so literally writing code on paper when not at a PC which I would later type in later
My friend’s mom gets called back for COBOL stints at major US banks all the time. I don’t know how long it’ll last, but apparently the list of people to select from and bring in is ridiculously short.
Eevee’s heteroglot entry for COBOL is interesting, coming from … practically anything else.
There’s also someone doing AOC in ABAP (basically SAP COBOL) who posts over in the AOC subreddit. I’ve looked at them and … mhm, I know some of these words!
I’ve fallen down the rabbithole. I’m reading a free course (from 2001ish) on Cobol.
COBOL is Maintainable
I now question everything. I mean, technically, basically anything is maintainable in that it’s possible…
Just remember the Voyager spacecraft are still out there… and being maintained.
I’ll learn it if you pay me $1 million/year
how to obtain this ‘last person that knows cobol’ title with whatever language goes extinct next?
you could just learn cobol. it’s not going anywhere, unfortunately
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
Like could I learn it enough to obtain a real job tho? That pays real money I mean?
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.
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.
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.
I know you’re joking, but it’s one of the only kinds of jobs I can picture motivational enough to pursue
My money is on PHP.
Like, 70% or more of the web runs on PHP. That’s also not going anywhere anytime soon.
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.
Oh I see what you’re saying.
Dang, maybe I should learn PHP…
TCL?
Perl
all of these are still used in modern applications. i suggest Forth.
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.
Fortran is everywhere. it got a new release less than ten years ago.
Numpy uses Fortran
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.
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).
Yeah. There’s always at least one mission critical Prel script that no one can read.
ADA or Jovial, I’m guessing.
Probably no longer possible now that we have generative AI, a coder can now be archived alongside the codebase itself.
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.
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.
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The reason banking still uses Cobol is the same reason they would never trust AI
My coworker knows cobol.
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Not reading the title either, I guess.
