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Comment by altitudinous | Hacker News Reader

My first serious computer job (early 1990's) was COBOL.

I last used it in 1997, then moved on to Oracle PL/SQL, Java, Oracle's Java software stacks and now iOS ObjC/Swift.

Now I'm 52 years old. I have my own apps now on the store, don't need the money but I am looking for a new challenge - something a bit more social than working for myself.

I think I'll do this COBOL refresher. Only issue is I'm in Australia but I see there may be some demand here too. Nothing to lose - plenty of time at the moment to do the courses. Good for a laugh anyway.

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Serious question, why do you use COBOL and "looking for a new challenge" in the same post? I found it a trivial language with a syntax that goes on for pages. It's entirely uninteresting. The only challenge is understanding any business requirements, and that's not a language thing.

The language itself is trivial to learn, the environment COBOL is running in is usually the challenge. I really enjoy bug fixing existing software, and I enjoy learning about existing systems. As I said I am done with working for myself, and as for the social aspect, I'd find it interesting to work with peers who may be closer to my age, and not a group who is just starting in the game working on their first big piece of software. I was there 30 years ago, this seems an opportunity to work with more mature and experienced folk. Also back in the day there were far more women working in software than there are now, there may be more gender balance in the older technologies.

It's interesting to me that systems could be written that function correctly once they go live and don't have to be taken offline for decades... the architecture, not the language

This really, really interests me as well, and I've written my iOS apps the same way too. They have no server side, no real dependencies, all client based and fully automated internally - so as well as being fully contained they schedule required notifications etc into the future without my intervention. As long as the user runs the app once about every four months (which isn't an issue given they get many notifications during that four months) then the app will work for a very long time and bring in passive revenue. I consider this a holy grail of software.

I like pure solar powered calculators for the same reason. If you were to send one back in time it would continue to work and be useful without requiring intervention or dying.

>(which isn't an issue given they get many notifications during that four months)

I assume users can turn notifications off though? Almost nothing on my iPhone is allowed to send me notifications.

Yes, they certainly can. Apple allows any apps notifications to be switched off at the OS level - it isn't optional. My users love the notifications though, and they commonly customise to get _more_ notifications. The reason it is 4 months is because iOS only allows 64 notifications to be scheduled in advance for any app, and if they want users can configure to schedule that many in a 4 month period.

Terrible code and terrible situations can be encountered in any language.

I had a project that gave all sorts of hints of stink that was Java based. Turns out that project involved integrating a system in a preexisting code base with tens of millions of lines of code. Limited documentation, so much abstraction Java was just a syntax of underlying conformity, the language was understanding the myriad of interdependent abstractions to accomplish the integration task. Documentation was incredibly limited given the scale of everything. Obviously, progress was painfully slow.

Java itself was not the problem, everything else was.

Wirte a highlevel to COBOL Compiler

Don't enjoy that stuff, someone else can do this academic project.

You totally miss the point. This is not about creating new code. It's about understanding and changing old code. To understand old dense code that is written with no comments, variable names like N1, X2 etc - finding out what the code does is the problem.

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