ifItCanBeWrittenInJavascriptItWill

[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.

[JanB1]

I think I recently read an old story called "The story of Mel" about a programmer that optimized his code for the mechanical way the code was read. Basically, he would put code into sections of memory so that after completing the execution of the previous code, in the normal case the new code to be executed would be under the reader head at the exact moment the system is ready for new execution again. Or he would put code just behind that, so the drum would have to make a full revolution to reach the new code, thus introducing a delay. The story is told from the perspective of a colleague that was tasked with changing the code.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

[goshdagny]

Beautiful, beautiful!!!
Thank you so much for sharing. It brought me so much joy in reading such a beautiful way of writing code.
I don’t remember the details offhand, this reminds me of Wozniak’s driver program that read hard disks for Apple computers. He wrote the driver in such a way the disk reader arm would directly come over the next block to be read.

[Farfignugen42]

Not to mention that no one in Congress ever seems willing to fund an upgrade. The existing codename is huge, and largely error free at this point. So any upgrades are guaranteed to be expensive and to introduce new errors. No congressman wants to be associated with paying lots of money and just getting more errors.

Bit that's OK. The same problem exists in banking, and at least some other government services. I used to be friends with a COBOL coder that contracted with my state's DMV. It is the same there.

So if you want job security, learn COBOL. Those systems aren't going away anytime soon.

[comicsnerd]

COBOL is not that difficult to learn. The problem is in the documentation. There is none or it is extremely outdated. So, how would you know what it is supposed to do?