Is it worth to learn COBOL or is it a dead language? Is work guaranteed for the next few decades?

Is it worth to learn COBOL or is it a dead language? Is work guaranteed for the next few decades?

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Learn COBOL and start working for any big enterprise translating COBOL into C.
You'll be rich, if you survive.

>if you survive
What do you mean?

No. The bean counters will order a complete rewrite when all the old farts who worked with COBOL for decades will be too old to work.

Do you know COBOL well enough to be sure about this?

>translating COBOL to C
>expecting to survive

your a dense one arent you

Not him, but they are already replacing it with Java software.

This, COBOL -> .Net-Bytecode/C#/Java converters are quite a business.

> translating COBOL to C
> implying any company does this
> implying companies don't force their devs to support legacy systems
> implying dirt-old banks wants innovation
Good one, user.

>your a dense one arent you
What do you mean?

My uncle is working on a bank, coding shit in COBOL. I can tell you it's worth, he's rich af

To get into COBOL you have to be 50+ years old and have a proven track record of at least 20 years of commercial experience in COBOL. It's way too late to even think about getting into this.

COBOL is such a pain to "code" in.

It's made for retards - and no, this is not a good thing.

I've only seen one COBOL job in my area and it was for a bank.

Bullshit. Companies used to take history major junior Army officers fresh back from Vietnam and teach them COBOL in 10 weeks. The oldest versions didn't have pointers or anything else complicated to learn. The problem with being a COBOL programmer is not the language, it's maintaining giant applications written by people who have been dead for 20 years.

Oh how wrong you are..

COBOL was made for non-programmers. Yes, it is not difficult to learn, but it is so devastating ugly and clumsy that in one year you'll whish you would have chosen a differnt job..

Think about you get money for playing with building blocks. The first few days are great, you make little things and get payed for it. But times passes by. After a few weeks it's not so cool anymore. And after a year you cringe from the sheer sound of it..


You have been warned.

Naw, mang. I coded in COBOL for years, it's in no way the worst language you can work with. There are lots worse, like RPG.

I've had to look up "RPG".

Jesus Christ, just when i thought i'd seen it all..

Now look up "MUMPS" and its dialects.

W-what is it?

Another form of cancer and proof that K&R weren't the first to invent cancer languages.

Hey, MUMPS looks pretty great!

The syntax reminds me on something like Python..

The hello world example looks rather harmless, but lets see if you still feel that way once you encounter MUMPS inhouse code that uses the non-reserved keywords as variable names.

I see..

On second thought the Syntax looks more like Perl, dense and powerful, but hard to maintain..


Here, a Tetris clone:

>github.com/pkoper/mumtris/blob/master/mumtris.m

My favorite part is:

write(s,y,x)
n i,j,l,c,d
d pos(y,x)
s l=$l(s) f i=1:1:l d
. s c=$e(s,i)
. i c?1N d
.. i 'c s y=y+1 d pos(y,x) q
.. s d=$e(s,i+1) f j=1:1:c w d
.. s i=i+1
. e w c
d pos(0,0)
q

hahaha!!!

NEat.