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A comment on The ancient technology keeping space missions alive. Parent comment

Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by justinator on Friday August 18, 2023 @11:44AM (#37177234)
There's a little more to it. If your original team retires because of old age, that's a lot of wisdom lost. Not everyone wants to learn COBOL to keep planes in the air and the IRS running, imagine needing to figure out the low level code on something millions of miles away with half the hardware broken, the battery cracked and leaking – and if the software update doesn't work, the entire mission is over?

It's altogether amazing.

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Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by ericbarrett on Friday August 18, 2023 @02:02PM (#37179641)
COBOL is really quite straightforward and readable. I don't think a developer who's already familiar with a modern language or two would have a hard time picking it up. The system it's operating is domain-specific knowledge anyway, and would be something a newcomer would have to learn (or be familiar with) regardless of language.
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Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by justinator on Saturday August 19, 2023 @04:27PM (#37192802)
>I don't think a developer who's already familiar with a modern language or two would have a hard time picking it up.

You're probably correct, but it's more about if they would want to pick up a language that has no future, except maintenance of already existing systems. (see: Perl).

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Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by JohnFen on Friday August 18, 2023 @05:14PM (#37182202)
> Not everyone wants to learn COBOL to keep planes in the air and the IRS running

But there's excellent money in being a COBOL programmer. Some might be interested in that.

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Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by deepspace on Friday August 18, 2023 @06:13PM (#37182842)
The article calls software from the 90s "old". Nobody used COBOL for mission-critical software at that time. There is embedded software I wrote in the 80s and 90s still running in the field, mostly written in C.
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Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by justinator on Saturday August 19, 2023 @04:26PM (#37192796)
I didn't wrote that COBOL was used in aerospace, but used it as an example in different industries.
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