Re:Ask HN: Why did people switch from COBOL to newer languages?
by eb0la on Saturday December 22, 2018 @04:26AM
(#18739798)
That's probably the most insightful answer I've seen in a long,long time.
We tend to ignore the human side of the tecnology business.
In fact young people usually wants to change the word, at least to find a pleace in the world for them.
There are a lot of support and maintenance positions available to junior developers, with a huge rotation because once they've learnt enough they want to build stuff.
COBOL might be a proven, old, technology... which means maintenance is important. New stuff must be build with a lot of legacy in mind, and you'll inherit legacy mistakes that worked and cannot be fixed unless you overhaul a huge amount of code.
That's not even sexy enough for senior, gray-haired developers; but helps pay the bills.
We tend to ignore the human side of the tecnology business. In fact young people usually wants to change the word, at least to find a pleace in the world for them.
There are a lot of support and maintenance positions available to junior developers, with a huge rotation because once they've learnt enough they want to build stuff.
COBOL might be a proven, old, technology... which means maintenance is important. New stuff must be build with a lot of legacy in mind, and you'll inherit legacy mistakes that worked and cannot be fixed unless you overhaul a huge amount of code.
That's not even sexy enough for senior, gray-haired developers; but helps pay the bills.