• TheMongoose@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      I’m in two minds about that. One the one hand, yes, of course - as all the original COBOL folks die off, the skills will be even rarer and thus worth more.

      On the other hand, if we keep propping up old shit, the businesses will keep relying on it and it’ll be even more painful when they do eventually get forced to migrate off it.

      On the other other hand, we know it works, and we don’t want to migrate everything into a series of Electron apps just because that’s popular at the moment.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Part of the problem is the cost of moving off it. Some companies simply can’t pay what that would cost, and that’s before you consider the risk.

        Tough spot to be in.

    • Yewb@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      You have to unlearn everything you know to learn it, go look its bad.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        If it works, why would we want to go through the trouble of switching to another language that will also eventually be regarded as needing to be retired? There’s decades of debugging and improvement done on their system, start over with a new system and all that work needs to be done again but with a programming language that’s probably much more complex and that leaves the door open to more mistakes…

        • dan1101@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          It wasn’t for me, too wordy and felt more like something for accounting/corporate than a programmer. I was offered a good-paying job programming COBOL out of college but turned it down because I didn’t want to spend my life with it. But that’s just me.