Ancient language is still the bread-and-butter of mainframe systems

  • shnizmuffinA
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    2 days ago

    Listen. I escaped learning COBOL by being born in the 1980s. However, since I’m so fucking old now, I understand that you DO NOT FIRE THE WIZARD. The Wizard, the one who knows the incantations because they were there when the spells were written? Irreplaceable. Don’t fuck with them. Pay them whatever they demand and do not ask questions.

    If you want to depreciate the Wizard, you cannot use their spells. You must create your own, and you better do it in a language that people under 40 can comprehend. And they have to be as bulletproof as the Wizard’s spells. Good luck getting an LLM to do that. Good luck getting a human to do that.

    • xep@discuss.online
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      2 days ago

      It’s not hard to learn COBOL. However, the intricacies of the system that The Wizard maintains is another matter altogether.

      • gressen@lemmy.zip
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        2 days ago

        I would argue that learning those intricaties is a part of learning the language. Otherwise you just know the syntax, somewhat like a LLM.