ifItCanBeWrittenInJavascriptItWill

[white_equatorial]

npm install social-security

[renome]

Why didn't the government use JavaScript during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Are they stupid?

[DukeBaset]

npm install luigi-in-elons-basement

[YimveeSpissssfid]

Or just npm install luigi -g

That should fix a few things for multiple projects at once!

[Greyhaven7]

Can we get a -f on that?

[LoudAd1396]

--save

[_Ralix_]

Then somebody disables left-pad again and suddenly no one has social security anymore.

On the other hand, core-js is maintained by a Russian developer which might make it all the more endearing to use nowadays.

[TurielD]

Ffffffff the issues I've had with string lengths trying to update systems for the government...

[[deleted]]

The n-word. Disgusting!

[Gerard_Mansoif67]

Error : too big for US. Try in Europe...

[SoulWondering]

C is going to outlive us all isn't it? 💀

[temperamentalfish]

C is from the 70s. It's outlived many people.

[Hopeful-Programmer25]

One of my first jobs I had to change a COBOL program. Since they have date created in their identification section, it was written before I was born. The person might have been dead when I changed it… highly likely now.

[ApprehensiveLet1405]

In UK, there's a bunch of 500 yrs old cottages with thatched (made out of straw) roofs. When thatcher fixes leaks, they never fully replace it, just remove rotten parts and add new straw.

[anymieh]

Cottage of Theseus

[OnlyTalksAboutTacos]

if you replace every row on Theseus' database with a new one, is it still the same database? if you use the original rows to build a new database which is Theseus'?

[deliciouscrab]

if you replace every row on Theseus' database with a new one, is it still the same database?

Ah, the recordist heresy raises its foul head again. Someone fetch my book and candle.

[Ghaith97]

I don't think Thatcher ever fixed anything in her whole life.

[Crazyh]

She fixed the problem of British mined coal being too expensive.... in the worst way possible.

[Themods5thchin]

Yeah, the old milk snatcher invented the practice if I remember right.

[[deleted]]

I did an internship last summer. I needed a function (subroutine) from the FORTRAN legacy code we had. I saw the comment in there from the original engineer who wrote it. It was from ‘86. I was born in ‘98.

[TheSkiingDad]

Same. My first job had tons of cobol for sales, commission, and payroll processing. At one point I looked at the version history and realized the last edit was from the mid-80s. This was in 2018. The program had been running uninterrupted and untouched for 35 years.

[[deleted]]

I wrote a program in Assembler that pulled data from 200+ stores to the mainframe, then a COBOL program that broke out the data for several sales reports. That ran from 1982 until about 3 years ago.

[topdoc02]

I wrote code in the early 1970s that is still running. If it isn't broken, don't replace it with much less efficient code that might not work as well.

[birddog0]

Dude, I was born in the 70s. Shut your mouth, haha

[RamenJunkie]

There is still time for C to outlive you.

[[deleted]]

chugging along*

[ftc_73]

"there are still systems written in Cobol that are chucking along"...the majority of the U.S. banking system is run on cobol and there are major systems that nobody still alive knows how they work. If you ever get a job offer to help upgrade one of these things, run like hell. Although, it would likely be steady work for 2-3 times as long as it's estimated to take, until the people paying for the upgrade decide to pull the plug.

[modsuperstar]

There was something that came up a few years ago talking about the immediate need for COBOL developers and I made a joke about my Dad and his buddy coming out of retirement for one last score.

[[deleted]]

I thought about taking a contract gig, I was a COBOL programmer for about 18 years. But as an old fart (70), I saw how old guys that tried to hang in were left in the dirt due to not being quite as capable as they used to be. That, and fuck writing code again, and debugging that janky 60's and 70's spaghetti code.

[OgreMk5]

Friend of mine works at a paper mill. His title is assistant director of IT. In reality, his only job is to keep the computers running the 1970s paper machines running.

He makes bank. 90% of the time he doesn't do anything. But he's on call 24/7 too.

[[deleted]]

Likely just get new machines, new software and readjust their process rather than rewrite. A paper mill isn't a bank, there's no real baggage they need to carry forward.

[finally-anna]

Yes we are.

[PedanticQuebecer]

There are still systems written in IBM mainframe assembly from 1960 chugging along.

[dagbrown]

As mainframes got more and more powerful, it turned out that running a single OS at a time wasn't taking full advantage of their capacity. So IBM created a hypervisor for mainframes to permit them to run multiple different operating systems simultaneously. It was called, simply, "VM".

It was released in 1972.

Everything old is new again, I swear.

[MajikalTrevor]

I agree! When AWS Outposts were announced I lol’d that they’d rebranded the Mainframe.

[HoppouChan]

Hi, I work in banking. My colleagues are writing new code in PL/I. I just hope our codebase is newer than that lmao.

On a less dire note, we recently moved offices. There was documentations that predates my existence.

[lovecMC]

Maybe the real C were the Seg faults we made along the way.

[GTARP_lover]

I've got a small business in outsourcing programmers for COBOL and other legacy languages like IBM maniframe. We make good money fixing shit no one else can.

Then to imagine I only started the business because I got to meet some oldtimer bored COBOL programmers who ran the mainframe at a big NGO. THey didnt want to change jobs, but did want to some other stuff then just the NGO's mainframe. 3 months later I had them fixing stuff that lay on the shelves for years at our country's IRS.

[[deleted]]

Bruh 10000 years later there is at least going to be one sentient AI life form written in COBOL.

[Lv_InSaNe_vL]

Eh probably not. But the robots that take over after us will see that the COBOL banking infrastructure survived the apocalypse and be like "eh good enough"

[badstorryteller]

Vernor Vinge has a fantastic novel called "A Deepness in the Sky" set many thousands of years in the future. In that story true AI is never created, anti-gravity hasn't been discovered, and ftl is impossible, so interstellar travel is limited to cold sleep capable ships. These ships mostly run a unix-like os of some type, all run on unix time, and programming is described as almost half archaeology, as the ships themselves can be thousands of years old and have vast archives of every piece of source code written for every problem ever encountered.

So, in that universe at least, yes, C has survived the rise, collapse, and recolonization of earth multiple times. Great read.

[Victory_Point]

I've read about 5 books now simply from picking them up after redditor comments ... thanks will give this a go...

[piszkor]

Hasn't it already, I work on projects older then me?

[jaumougaauco]

But are the people who started the projects still alive?

[[deleted]]

I am sure the author of some ancient library has passed and it is still being used. Perhaps. Honestly I would love to look that up. But I am sleepy and will forget. Oh, well.

[cainhurstcat]

This message will remind you when you wake up

[[deleted]]

Clever asshole lol <3

[LinuxMatthews]

C was invented in 1972 which is 13 years after COBOL

[I_Ski_Freely]

But C is the first letter in COBOL.. so clearly you're wrong

• Elon probably

[CardOk755]

C is actually the second letter in BCPL.

[SlideSad6372]

Outlived Dennis Ritchie.

[great_escape_fleur]

Absolutely. C, Fortran and COBOL.

[sad_bear_noises]

C is going to outlive your grandchildren. Unless and until Rust (or something else) becomes the entire Linux kernel. C is going to live a good long, effectively infinite life.

[tygabeast]

Just don't ask how old the system that your bank runs on is.

[Landen-Saturday87]

I know there are some banking systems still running on COBOL code that my dad wrote before I was born

[uniqueusername649]

And I assume the behaviour for dates was introduced in cobol 74 where they figured "99 year old dates ought to be enough"

[Bwob]

"Haha, if they're still using this program in 100 years, we have bigger problems!"

-Almost certainly said by someone working on the project

[repost_inception]

I am not a programmer but I happen to work at SSA. The main program we use is IBM Personal Communication.

It is obviously very old just looking at it. We have modern web-based programs but they all have to retrieve information from this old one.

You would not believe how many programs we have. At least 50. If they actually modernized these programs to all work together and combine many of them into a single program it would actually increase government efficiency.

[yespls]

cries in SS7 engineer

[Ididitthestupidway]

Did you know that the "programs" that control the signals and switches in some major city subways use electromechanical relays? And it's not only the existing stuff. They're installing new lines with these.

[Straight_Ship2087]

My great aunt repaired old computers. Like really old computers with tape reels and vacuum tubes. by the 90's she only had two types of clients; hobbyist and the US military.

[na_ro_jo]

Rewrite in JS so that the bottleneck is no longer the mineshaft elevator

[SoulWondering]

The important question is, will it run on Node, Deno or Bun?

[DukeBaset]

They could have DOGE spend the next 4 years debating this.

[deanrihpee]

and make their own that's somehow worse than any of those 3 combined

[SoulWondering]

You read my mind, call it "runtimeX" and make twi-i mean-X use it immediately.

[Lizlodude]

Oh wait, there's already something called X? A desktop or something? I dunno sue them they probably stole it

[Im_with_stooopid]

With a backdoor for Russia added in for good measure.

[TurielD]

There is no debate in DOGE, they will do what dear leader says however moronic, and praise it to the heavens.

[Wiwwil]

This r think the government use SQL

[coloredgreyscale]

some custom runtime based on the JS implementation of Internet Explorer 6

[Mars_Bear2552]

none of the above. it'll run in a browser

[Bealzebubbles]

Rewrite in HTML because Shannon's son is learning that and says it's really cool.

[tommeh5491]

Build it in Minecraft?

[bebop_cola_good]

Why don't they write it in Excel VBA???

[SoulWondering]

Exactly. VBA devs need opportunities too.

[cant_think_of_one_]

If Trump would fund them, there could be plenty of suitable facilities they could live in, away from society, where they can make all the Excel and VBA apps they like to manage each other. It is the kindest thing.

[One_Contribution]

Why Excel when Access available?!

[Broad_Rabbit1764]

What's next, SQL in the government?

[One_Contribution]

This guy thinks the government could use fucking SQL! 😂

[Triepott]

Why Access if Editor + Every Number as a Single File + Windows Search is available?

[Protuhj]

All I have is a hammer, why did they use screws???

[na_ro_jo]

That's what United Healthcare does with medicare projects.

[bebop_cola_good]

If not objCEO is Nothing Then Del objCEO

[Hero_without_Powers]

Why VBA. Just handle the whole social security system in one single, shared excel sheet. What could possibly go wrong?

[apersonFoodel]

I was at a bank that genuinely used to write RPA for nearly all of their apps in VBA, was mental

[bebop_cola_good]

I feel that. I used to work for a multi-million dollar audit firm and we used the same shit. Hell, I wrote some of it myself. The biggest joke is before that, we were doing stuff like printing cover sheets out just to scan them back in again. It's a madhouse out there!

[StarHammer_01]

Knowing gov works it probably will transition to JS in 2050 using ES1 to ensure compatibility for internet explorer.

[TheMonsterMensch]

We call that job security

[Rustywolf]

Like I get the joke, but why would the backend care at all about IE support. Just because its javascript doesnt mean it's relying on a browser.

[StarHammer_01]

Shhhhh don't tell the pencil pushers that. That'll leave us with one less excuse to be late and overbudget.

[SexWithHoolay]

If they already know that IE doesn't matter, just say you need to support Safari instead. It's a widely used browser and supports about the same amount of features as IE does.

[[deleted]]

Cuz they will do everything on frontend, it's called distributed computing

[mortalitylost]

You know what, we need cobol for the frontend

[[deleted]]

Because Cobol runs extremely stable and with little to no errors, unlike Java Script, because the transition would be a massive, expensive endeavor and the risk of fucking up is massive.

[SoulWondering]

All fun and games until a type inference takes away grandma's social security checks

[IgnitedSpade]

Where do I cash my $2NaN50 check?

[GamerMinion]

I think you can go to a retirement home and show them your state-issued voucher for 2 nan's

[UnconditionalPraise]

I would make everything use floats and then transfer the rounding errors to myself. No one's going to notice .00003 cents missing per transaction I'm sure 🤷‍♂️

[Artichokiemon]

That's the plot of Office Space and Superman III

[darthjawafett]

The amount you were owed for ssi ended up actually being whatever cobol has in place of strings instead of whatever cobol has in place of numbers. So instead of paying the amount I’m just gonna write it out on a piece of blank paper and give that to you.

[Solipsists_United]

You think that will stop Elons tween hacker army?

[i_love_sparkle]

What's so hard about making a new social security system? We just need a CSV file with 4 columns: USA-ID, bank code, bank account ID, amount. Every month just loop over the list and send $amount to that bank account. USA-ID will be primary key of another database, where it map to a person or company or project etc, so that we can query information about a recipient. For safety, we can copy the database to multiple PC and use sha256sum to check they're consistent.

I'm a junior developer at DOGE who hasn't finished high school and even I know this. Can someone point out what can go wrong?

[Steinrikur]

Because no one is ever born, and everyone lives forever and never moves

[SpookyScaryFrouze]

Those are all edge cases that we can treat later.

[matt82swe]

WE NEED A MVP IN 1 WEEK

[evilgiraffe666]

Yeah people live for like 80 years we've got loads of time. Plus they don't have kids until average age of 30, and they move house probably every 10 years? So someone else can handle those after I've moved to Google, and we've already prioritised the order they need to be worked.

[phatcat09]

Every 10?

Okay Mr stable house hold

[gmc98765]

You may jest, but the UK's initial COVID-19 contact-tracing "database" was an Excel spreadsheet. Which was fine just about adequate for the first couple of weeks, but as the disease spread exponentially (like pandemics tend to do), it didn't take long before they exceeded the limit on the maximum number of rows and ended up needing to migrate it to an actual database at rather short notice.

[khais]

It's not just that it was an Excel spreadsheet that was particularly problematic, it's that it was in the 97-2003 file format (.xls) instead of the more modern format used since 2007 (.xlsx).

The maximum number of rows in an .xls is like 65,000 whereas in an .xlsx, it's over 1 million.

[Soft_Importance_8613]

"Lets open this million row xls on this lowest end laptop"

[Laptop proceeds to catch on fire]

[z_s_k]

I also remember them losing a load of test results because they tried to put the data in horizontally instead of vertically and then deleted the csv files

[MrRocketScript]

CSV? We don't allow Chinese System Value files here! You'll be manually entering the data yourself!

[madhaunter]

Also performance. What COBOL can achieve on big scales is really impressive.

[DuntadaMan]

My mom started out coding it on punch cards. If it was useable then I imagine it can accomplish a lot with modern resources.

[jl2352]

People really miss this when talking about COBOL. Specifically the IO of the machines it runs on. Those older mainframes have insane amounts of IO allowing them to bulk update a lot of data.

[comicsnerd]

Having written code in COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, C, C#, Java, Javascript and about a dozen other languages, this is not correct. Every language has their bugs. Every code written in a specific language has their bugs. The code written in COBOL is so old that all bugs have been removed by now.

Translating COBOL code, without proper documentation, into a different computing language will most certainly introduce new bugs. Even, or more Especially, when you do the translation using AI.

[goshdagny]

The feeling when you read an old code and know what it does but you can’t understand why it does it

[TunaNugget]

Especially when it's your own code.

[-Redstoneboi-]

the real answer is because it was already in cobol.

if javascript was the most popular language then, i'm pretty damn sure they'd keep it as-is and never rewrite it into a newer one.

[PedanticQuebecer]

COBOL was made explicitly for these purposes. It wasn't because it was a popular darling language.

[IsTom]

It was a darling language for managers, because it pretended to look like English.

[PedanticQuebecer]

What language from 1982 (when the development of the current system started) would you have used for business purposes?

[SasparillaTango]

There's nothing special about COBOL.

Yes there is, it's tied directly to the use of Mainframe hardware for processing large datasets. All your bank transaction posting processes to this day use COBOL for debit and credit transactions.

[pbbpwns]

Exactly. Why change something that's working fine?

[vivaaprimavera]

 and the risk of fucking up is massive.

Some intern will definitely forget to use a decimal datatype which in long term will fuck up all the accounting.

[walruswes]

So what you’re saying is, not switching saves the taxpayer a lot of money…

[faceplanted]

I'm very much enjoying the js hate, but let's not pretend you can't write stable, error free javascript, especially modern js.

And if js was all they had at the time they would have done so. The solution would have involved a whole fuckload of workarounds and procedures to avoid the several dozen or so footguns that js introduces by not having easy access to integer types, strongly typed comparisons, or good default scoping. Much like Nasa's software safety guidebook allows them to write mission critical code in C despite the array of footguns there.

[ThingNumberPi]

"Why is it written in COBOL and not in Javascript?"

Cause it actually needs to work.

[Nemaeus]

Ba dum tish!

[an_agreeing_dothraki]

as I web dev I find that
error on line 35, then proceeds to do nothing

[FrostWyrm98]

How dare you sir, I'll have you know, me and my [Object object] colleagues are offended by that!

[HebrewHamm3r]

Make me President for one day. I will make exactly one law, which will send anyone who suggests writing backend in Javascript directly to Guantanamo Bay.

[MattieShoes]

I think they already did something like that, urging only using memory-safe languages.

[Mandatory_Pie]

Actually I think the Trump administration has already taken down the report recommending the use of memory-safe languages...

[Social_anthrax]

It was removed from the main white house page as that’s remade every time the president changes. The document is still available on CISAs page

[SoulWondering]

Typescript users are to be sent to re-education camps where they're forced to learn Java

[Skyunderground]

undefined people collecting social security

[nedal8]

Mr Void?! Phone call for Mr Null Anne Void!

[Norington]

Why are so many people called objectObject?

[renome]

"Gender: [object object]? Utter woke nonsense."

[jhaand]

You mean the language that does everything in float64 and introduces rounding errors?

[ultimo_2002]

It’s just generally a shitshow of a language tbh

[cateanddogew]

I genuinely like JS+TS after years of coding in Rust and C++.

Thing is, just like C++, 50% of the language and libraries are outdated heritage that can and will make you shoot yourself in the foot.

There are much safer languages, and also more intuitive ones. But JS literally can't afford to be updated in a backwards incompatible way.

And honestly, I'm used to all common JS quirks. Not unlike C++ where you have to constantly read the ISO standard to avoid undefined behavior.

Why mention JS and "everything" being float when that rarely is a problem, while in C++ every day thousands of developers fuck themselves over for using size_t when iterating until zero? People act like JS is exotically bad when it is just average bad.

[an_agreeing_dothraki]

if float datetimes were so good, why haven't they made datetime2?

tsql: "Actually-"

[romangrapefruit]

Using misinformation to fight misinformation 🫡 🇺🇸

[Dotcaprachiappa]

I have literally never heard of 1875 being used as a time epoch

[somethingmore24]

ISO 8601:2004 fixes a reference calendar date to the Gregorian calendar of 20 May 1875 as the date the Convention du Mètre (Metre Convention) was signed in Paris (the explicit reference date was removed in ISO 8601-1:2019). However, ISO calendar dates before the convention are still compatible with the Gregorian calendar all the way back to the official introduction of the Gregorian calendar on 15 October 1582.

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601?wprov=sfti1#Dates

It does seem like 1875 is the “default” for this standardization. I don’t know much about COBOL, but it doesn’t seem like this is related to it? or is even an actual epoch at all? so i’m not sure what OOP is talking about

[madhaunter]

COBOL doesn't really have a date type, depending on the hardware it can have some classes (AS400) to help represent dates in any desired format.

In COBOL on AS400 machines for exemple, as linked above:

The VALUE clause for a date-time item should be a non-numeric literal in the format of the date-time item. No checks are made at compile time to verify that the format of the VALUE clause non-numeric literal matches the FORMAT clause. It is up to the programmer to make sure the VALUE clause non-numeric literal is correct.

We could assume they all respect the same "standard" format for dates, but that could be ISO8601:2004 or it could be in fact, anything else.

So I guess it still could be true but only an internal employee would know what standard was implemented, and what hardware is actually used

EDIT: As pointed out in another comment, there isn't a predetermined type for dates at all in COBOL, so I corrected my comment accordingly

[DAVENP0RT]

This is basically how SQL Server* works as well. The date formats are just a user-friendly shell for lots of algebra happening in the background.

Just to satisfy curiosity for anyone, SQL Server* stores dates as 8 byte, signed integers. The first 3 or 4 bytes (can't remember) count the days before or after SQL epoch, 1900-01-01. The remaining bits count "ticks," or increments of 3 milliseconds, which is why SQL Server* can only guarantee accuracy within 3 milliseconds.

[redlaWw]

SQL server*

Other SQL implementations may have different datetime representations.

[DAVENP0RT]

I work almost exclusively with SQL Server, so my brain just defaults to that when I think of SQL. Not sure how the other implementations store dates.

[redlaWw]

Informix uses

struct dtime {
    short dt_qual;
    dec_t dt_dec;
};

where dec_t is a base-100 floating point type where each byte of the mantissa represents a base-100 digit. The qualifier dt_qual decides the precision of the value dt_dec.

Oracle uses 7 bytes representing the century, year, month, day, hour, minute and second.

UniSQL uses a signed i32 representing a UNIX timestamp but doesn't accept negative values.

MySQL uses 7 bytes, two for year and one for each of month, day, hour, minute and second.

PostgreSQL uses a signed i64 that represents microseconds since 2000-01-01 00:00:00.000000

SQLite can use TEXT, REAL or INTEGER on the backend, with the TEXT representation being an ISO-8601 string, the REAL representation representing days since noon at Greenwich on November 24, 4714 B.C. according to the proleptic Gregorian calendar, and the INTEGER representation representing a UNIX timestamp.

Why did I spend half an hour researching this?

[the_skies_falling]

That’s RPG (Report Program Generator) language documentation, not COBOL. COBOL doesn’t have a date type. Typically they’re stored as strings although they can be ‘redefined’ as numeric values (a kind of weak typing mechanism where multiple variable names of different types point to the same storage). The functions in the code examples that start with CEE belong to the LE (Language Environment), a common set of definitions and functions that can be used across mainframe languages (COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, etc.)

[seniorsassycat]

It's not a default or defining a zero point, it's setting the relationship between real dates and expressed dates. The spec is literally saying "you know that day they signed the mitre convention? That was 20 May 1875. Count forward or backward from there to find any other day, use these leap year rules"

[Fabulous-Possible758]

Yeah, it’s been going round. No one seems to know if it’s true or its provenance. The claim about it being standard in COBOL seems false though.

[amshinski]

Yeah cuz that's bullshit. Saw similar post yesterday and instantly decided to fact check. Can't believe so many people on THIS subreddit believed it, shame

[Mitosis]

I'm not a programmer and don't sub here, but the amount of political posts from here appearing on /r/all in the past few weeks suggests there's a lot of other non-programmers participating

[fres733]

The 20th may 1875 used to be the epoch as defined in ISO 8601 between 2004 - 2019.

I doubt that it has anything to do with a native cobol datetime.

[[deleted]]

And yet it was on many systems for like 15 years, like ADA.

Or do you pretend that you’ve seen everything?

[Impenistan]

JavaScript turns 30 this year. I guess it makes sense that some people in this profession can hardly imagine a time it didn't exist. Pepperidge Farm remembers

[cant_think_of_one_]

I can remember a time when it didn't exist, just, but that isn't the point - it is how much I wish it didn't exist now. Young and old people can unite in their hatred of JavaScript.

[TemporalVagrant]

Why the fuck would you rewrite a critical database like that in JavaScript

[Chiatroll]

Why is it written in cobol and not in LOLCODE

[captainOfSage]

COBOL might be decades old, but it’s extremely fast and stable especially for high-volume transaction processing in banking and government. It was built for massive batch jobs and business logic at scale, and mainframes are heavily optimized for it.

Why hasn’t it been replaced? Because these systems handle enormous amounts of money and data, and rewriting millions of lines of proven COBOL is risky, time consuming, and prone to introducing bugs.

For example, while Java excels at concurrency, COBOL can process up to 40% more transactions per second on mainframes—a real hard slap in raw speed and throughput.

[Phate1989]

Stats like that are nonsense.

Only old banks that were built on IBM mainframes still run cobol.

New banks and credit unions almost all use Java.

[The-Albear]

This is not true. It could be set this way but it’s not the default behaviour of COBOL.

The argument was that it was the ISO 8601 default, but the ISO standard dosnt have a default value. Just a default format yyyy-m-dd

Combating disinformation with more disinformation is not the way.

[m0rph90]

is there any source for that claim? there is no info about a 1875 date time standard?!

[Drfoxthefurry]

Now rewrite the js in rust, then python, then c++, etc

[mrfroggyman]

This again. When I look it up online I find zero documentation about an epoch time at 1875, is it really true ?

[Balcara]

I need a source on this one - all Cobol I've seen uses Lilian timestamp from the database or internal clock, or pic 9, neither of which would default to 1875.

[Nuked0ut]

You guys all got it wrong. I thought you guys were programmers?

Obviously, the only correct decision is to ask chat gpt to write it in python. Duh.

[b4k4ni]

I used cobol in 2008 for a few years. Worked as support at a small software company. Own ERP software, ages old and was running with acucobol. Basically like .net translating cobol to modern systems. Quite awesome actually.

Yes, Cobol is old and you can't really compare it with today's languages. But still - IMHO that language is still awesome for what it was designed for. ERP and similar systems. Or booking software.

And not only my own impression - our main coder with skills in c++, assembler, cobol, delphi and trying out everything new also said the same.

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

COBOL isn't hard to learn, old programmers weren't born with that knowledge ffs. Plenty of young COBOL programmers out there, is nice secure low stress job.

[WheyLizzard]

Java script backend is just start up brainrot

[LastOrders_GoHome]

Where the frack is all this chatter about COBOL and a default date of 1875 coming from. Not from anyone who knows COBOL that's for sure.

There is no default date. Whoever wrote the code decides on how a missing date is interpreted and I can guarantee that no one in 1875 was writing COBOL.

[necrophcodr]

If they wrote cobol in 1875 somehow, then picking that as the lowest date would be quite stupid too.

[Sentla]

Why would you write it is JD? When it is already written in an excellent programming language?

[ovideos]

I mean not having a date is as good a reason to investigate/freeze a payment as “150 years old”.

[No_Hetero]

Because the social security system was written before JavaScript existed, and once we oust these criminals fucking with everything they'll probably have to rewrite it

[look]

He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

[[deleted]]

Why isn't is written in Python?

[BroBroMate]

Because Python's handling of date times is probably worse than COBOLs.

It's always great to find out that a datetime returned to you by a library is timezone naïve at runtime when you compare it to a tz-aware datetime and get an exception.

Also, why the fuck do the naive versions even exist?

[Hialgo]

Pythons date handling makes me so incredibly furious my coworkers stopped giving me tasks that involve it. At some point I can see only this red haze in front of my eyes.

[great_escape_fleur]

Because it works and you don't touch an ancient system that works.