COBOL joke from 1999:

A COBOL programmer, tired of all the extra work and chaos caused by the impending Y2K bug, decides to have himself cryogenically frozen for a year so he can skip all of it.

He gets himself frozen, and eventually is woken up when several scientists open his cryo-pod.

“Did I sleep through Y2K? Is it the year 2000?”, he asks.

The scientists nervously look at each other. Finally, one of them says “Actually, it’s the year 9999. We hear you know COBOL.”

  • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
    10·
    25 days ago

    I’ve been programming in various languages for about 15 years. I’m stuck working on software automation.

    how do I transition to COBOL development?

    • ellen@piefed.socialEnglish
      14·
      25 days ago

      It’s easy peasy. Read a tutorial and it’s done. Easier than C. Biggest problem with COBOL software is most programs are idioticly huge and have been patched and expanded for decades. Touching anything will break everything. Source: i patched y2k

  • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
    9·
    25 days ago

    I had a job that used COBOL and programmed in it. Its not terrible. It even works with sql.

    The issue is the decades of code with little to o documentation, the fixes for issues like y2k that wirked at the time but now have problems, and greedy companies that want you to pay per processor. All the while you yourself are one of three people in the city that are looking to slowly pull everything out of COBOL, making it just a bit harder to get a job next time.

      • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        7·
        25 days ago

        Bro he posted it by accident because same guy posting this thing twice in less than a minute is obviously a mistake(probably client issue)

        I originally told to delete this one because this has less upvotes, but now since there are more comments here, deleting other one might be better

        • abbadon420@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          25 days ago

          I had the exact same thing happen to me. My client posted something 4 times in the same community. I got banned for it, on the charge of being a bot. I contacted the mods and luckily they were understanding and eventually unbanned me.