The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore (COBOL History lesson)

Hey, I know a lot of COBOL developers and, on average, the last change the code they are working on happened just 20 years ago!

Maybe “no one” can read it because “everyone “ posts YouTube links with some SEO bullshit shouting at me like a fucking tabloid, instead of a link to the readme of the video (transcript)? I know I’m old man shouts at void here but STFFFFFFFFU. Tldw.

For non-video people like me: The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore

The real headline behind it: IBM plans to update COBOL via Watson AI to Java.

plans to update COBOL via Watson AI to Java.

it went from bad to worse
Oh. Asked and answered, thanks!
This is delicious. I hope they hurry up, and I hope they do it in a really large really public context.

I've had this conversation, but today's generation of AI won't:

"No, I can't just do a one for one translation. Some of the core operating principles of the language are different, and the original intent needs to be well understood to make the appropriate translation choice. If I just translate it one to one, with no understanding of the business context. you're going to suffer from years off debugging subtle but impactful bugs."

Get on with it IBM. Let's light this dumpster fire so we can all bask together in it's glow (and smell).

There may be a day coming in the next 100-1000 years when a learning algorithm is a suitable replacement for an expert engineer, but that day has not arrived (and the early evidence of that impending arrival hasn't arrived, either. I haven't seen evidence of AGI experiments with even toddler reasoning levels, so far. Toddler level reasoning wil come before AGI with infrastructure deployment skills, which itself is probably coming before AGI with expert business logic diagnostic skills. This could all be 20 years or 1000 years away. But we will probably see LLMs running deeply insightful life changing management workshops sometime roughly next week, since a trained parrot could do that. If we have an AGI that can meaningfully reason with small numbers in the next 20 years, we will be making great progress and on track for the rest to arrive - someday. If not, then we're probably waiting on a missing computational breakthrough.)
- But we will probably see LLMs running deeply insightful life changing management workshops sometime roughly next week, since a trained parrot could do that.
  
  Wasn't there a (successful) comany that replaced it's CEO with an AI?

At Uni doing CompSci in the mid 1980s, we were told the likes of Cobol was dead, and we were taught Pascal :)

Cobol is dead.

And I think it's about time to start telling people Java and Perl are dead, so they can marvel at how much Cobol and Java and Perl are still doing in production after death.
- It's dead in a similar way to Latin where nobody learns it as a first language. Everyone who learns it does so for a specific purpose.
  
  In Canada there are large organizations (including many in the government) who subsidize college courses on Cobol just to be able to get some fresh talent to learn it. In some cases they'll pay the tuition for the course entirely. Huge systems at the center of critical government functions still depend on Cobol .
- They're not dead, they're alive and actively doing work. People want to change that and move on to a better dystopia.
I took a Pascal class in Junior High summer school. I thought it was very weird compared to BASIC.
They could probably tweak Watson to turn Cobol into Pascal.

I always wonder if I should just learn COBOL and try to just do a few juicy contracts a year and focus on my other pursuits (farming and considering making a game, as well as vacation of course) the rest of the year.

Just knowing the language isn't enough to make the obscene money. You have to also be very familiar with the systems that use the language, and that takes years.
- I have domain knowledge for some usages at least, and worked on things that were converted fairly recently from COBOL and places that still had AS/400 and such in use. I am aware I would need experience (beyond personal) before any real money would be there.
My friend's mom gets called back for COBOL stints at major US banks all the time. I don't know how long it'll last, but apparently the list of people to select from and bring in is ridiculously short.
- how can you realistically enter that list?
  
  its not like they bring in just anyone that learns it i guess?
I wouldn't recommend it. I actually looked up COBOL jobs a while ago, and while they paid more, it was only like 20% more - not enough to make it worth it IMO.
- I live and work in Japan where dev salaries are much lower so, if I could just get a contract gig in USD, that would be pretty big for me especially with 1usd being 150 JPY or more
I don't know if this is realistic. Considering making a game is a full time job.
- The creator of Minecraft made the game in his spare time.
- This isn't true. If you can get by while working part-time, you still have at least 40 hours every two weeks to work on your game.
  
  It's one of my biggest regrets, that after school I immediately jumped into full-time job, even though I realistically could live comfortably with 1/3 of the pay I was getting, since young+no familly+no car+shared living reduces your living costs by a very large margin. My best friend did that and has been working only 2 days per week since. I was trying to keep up with him, working on our game in my free time, but it's simply not feasible to build on top of 40 hours per week of regular job, and then do anything meaningful on your side projects. I barely struggled to get myself to do at least 20h of work per month on the project, missing deadlines, and it sucked.
  
  He, on the other hand, kept our game project afloat and moving forward, with 60+ hours per month, while also writing and running a large LARP for 100 of players, directing his own theater group, and in general successfully working on a lot of projects, including several smaller games.
  
  The best advice I can give, if you want to be a game developer, is to 1) not work in gamedev and 2) work part-time. The IT salary should net you a comfortable life even on part-time pay, assuming it's not gamedev. Smaller studios will have difficulties keeping afloat if they need to pay you, and in larger AAA studio you will be the same code-monkey crunching JIRA tickets as you would be in any IT job, but for a lot less money. And the design freedom you get when your livelyhood doesn't depend on your art's success, be it games or anything else, is totally worth it.
  
  For example, this game has been developed solely in free time, without anyone getting paid for working on it. It's not AAA and the development takes a long time, but it definitely doesn't need to be a fulltime job.
- It won't be my first and I'm not going super ambitious or AAA. If it takes me 5 years to do it, that's fine.
  
  I wrote my first game in straight C with no laptop so literally writing code on paper when not at a PC which I would later type in later
Eevee's heteroglot entry for COBOL is interesting, coming from … practically anything else.

There's also someone doing AOC in ABAP (basically SAP COBOL) who posts over in the AOC subreddit. I've looked at them and ... mhm, I know some of these words!
- I've fallen down the rabbithole. I'm reading a free course (from 2001ish) on Cobol.
  
  COBOL is Maintainable
  
  I now question everything. I mean, technically, basically anything is maintainable in that it's possible...

Some people know it, and they make obscene salaries with their knowledge.

no, they don't

Maintaining old code is the real drawback. Surely nobody finds that fun.

COBOL is just the turd on the shit cake.

Pay me to do it remotely and I'll jump at the chance
- Friend of mine maintains COBOL for an insurance company. He lives on the opposite side of the country from his business, and is only on call one weekend a month.
  
  Dude got hired before he even graduated, getting paid 70k, and gets to live wherever he wants.
  
  I would kill for that lol

how to obtain this 'last person that knows cobol' title with whatever language goes extinct next?

you could just learn cobol. it's not going anywhere, unfortunately
- As someone who has worked with it, it's not too bad. Lots of $$ if you know someone.
  
  The biggest issue (that she goes into), is the lack of context. Why is the thing doing what it is doing is the hardest part
- Like could I learn it enough to obtain a real job tho? That pays real money I mean?
My money is on PHP.
- Like, 70% or more of the web runs on PHP. That's also not going anywhere anytime soon.
- TCL?
Vba
- I'm a vba wizard, do not tempt me into waiting until it's at the state of cobol
ADA or Jovial, I’m guessing.
Probably no longer possible now that we have generative AI, a coder can now be archived alongside the codebase itself.
- I know devs writing in it making over 200k per year. Ai isn't that useful unless you can correct for it's mistakes, which requires some experience with the language.
  
  Maybe in another 10 years.
- The reason banking still uses Cobol is the same reason they would never trust AI
- GenAI coding assistants are only as good as the data they are trained on. Less-used proglangs make up a tiny fraction of the available data, or may even be completely absent. There is a reason coding assistants give convincing results with Python and JS/TS, but underperform even on relatively up-and-coming langs like Rust.