I never did much COBOL but I could dust off my Fortran77 and punch cards! https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html
Exactly. I'm sure any good C++, Python, Pascal, whatever programmer could grab a COBOL book (if there are any still!) and modify existing code no problem.
But only if there is any decent money in it or if you find yourself out of work in this recession and are desperate enough. "Will code COBOL for food", hope it doesnt come to that. Blast from the past, from the Dot.com crash 18 years ago, who remembers Razorfish.
Absolutely. I used to program in COBOL very easy. If there is a GUI debugging is easy, if not back to write line debug.
"For instance, with more than 362,000 New Jersey residents filing for unemployment in the past two weeks, the 40-year-old mainframes that process those claims are being overloaded." This is hilarious. At an era where a personal PC can easily handle millions of records - 362,000 is a problem.
Many major banks still operate on mainframes. From what I heard there are no docs and most people who knew shit are long gone. They are literally afraid to touch that code. And require tons of approvals for even a small change.
Old software that was slowly built up over decades and becomes entrenched in the business. You cant just rewrite in a few month or even in 5 years using the latest tech. Most software projects get canned within 2 years. Probably 95% of them. Those mainframes codebases have massive survivorship bias. You can try and rewrite it, break it and up into bits and create sub projects and try and rewrite it all eventually. But most of those sub projects will just fail.