It’s not the 1st time a language/tool will be lost to the annals of the job market, eg VB6 or FoxPro. Though previously all such cases used to happen gradually, giving most people enough time to adapt to the changes.
I wonder what’s it going to be like this time now that the machine, w/ the help of humans of course, can accomplish an otherwise multi-month risky corporate project much faster? What happens to all those COBOL developer jobs?
Pray share your thoughts, esp if you’re a COBOL professional and have more context around the implication of this announcement 🙏
Well, I’d rather the day be sooner than later. Also, this is why you have… Backup servers and development environments. You don’t just flick the Switch randomly one day after code is made. You run months and months of simulated transactions on the new code until you get an adequate amount of bugs fixed.
There will come a time when these old COBOL machines will just straight die, and they can’t be assed to keep making new hardware for them. And the programmers will all die out too. And then your shit out of luck. I’d rather the last few remaining COBOL programmers help translate to some other long lasting language before they all kick the bucket and not after.
Nah, dump it all.
COBOL programs don’t handle utf8 and other modern things like truly variable length strings.
Best thing to do is refactor and periodically test by turning off the mainframe system to see what breaks. Why something was done is lost to the sands of time at this point.