Re:COBOL: A 1959 Idea and 2022 Technology
by hyperman1 on Saturday March 05, 2022 @05:33AM
(#30566246)
I touched some cobol on the side. My experience is these people are business knowledge keepers first and developers second.
The language capability and their tech level was extremely low. I got superpowers like grepping the full code base for a thing to refactor, or writing an sql select statement that could query a whole table at once, instead of just 1 record. Otoh, I ran into trouble when trying to integrate an url longer than 1 line of 80 chars. Non ISO8859-characters are still impossible over there.
Their superpower was explaining what the business actually did, what edge cases were forgotten,...
The unfortunate truth was I was easily replacable with any dev from the last 20 years, if only someone wanted to actually talk to them instead of stonewalling them for their incomprehensible elder rituals. And I got paid a lot better, too.
The language capability and their tech level was extremely low. I got superpowers like grepping the full code base for a thing to refactor, or writing an sql select statement that could query a whole table at once, instead of just 1 record. Otoh, I ran into trouble when trying to integrate an url longer than 1 line of 80 chars. Non ISO8859-characters are still impossible over there.
Their superpower was explaining what the business actually did, what edge cases were forgotten,...
The unfortunate truth was I was easily replacable with any dev from the last 20 years, if only someone wanted to actually talk to them instead of stonewalling them for their incomprehensible elder rituals. And I got paid a lot better, too.