I wouldn’t be mad about it, I hear there’s big bucks in the arcane languages.
The money pays for an individual’s knowledge in the arcane language, rather than the fact they use it.
There is?
Where exactly?
It’s been a while since I was told this, so not sure how true it still is, but there a was a niche but lucrative market for people who could maintain stuff in Fortran, COBOL and the like.
Because there were some critical antediluvian pieces of software in banking, big businesses, etc that some companies were terrified of having to replace one day.
I’d expect that by now most would have migrated to more common languages, but I don’t really know.
I’m in IT in the financial industry. There is indeed still a ton of COBOL around.
I guess some things never change, quite literally.
I’ve only worked for a bank for a few months, and it was on a new service project, so no idea what made the old finance workflows tick. For all I know it was the same there.
I heard that story, too… When I started studying. That was almost 20 years ago. I’d have assumed they had moved on until now if that hadn’t been an urban myth in the first place.
I work at an insurance company, and our core business system is written in RPG. We are starting the process of splitting it up and modernizing it, but I suspect there will still be some RPG code running in production in ten years.
A lot of codebases in skuff like fluid mechanics, meterological models, quantum mechanics etc. are still in Fortran. Largely because there is very little to gain from rewriting the code base in some other language.
I would choose Fortran for a new project 0/10 times, but to be fair, it’s a completely viable language for developing complex and computationally intensive models, and it’s better to have the 1-2 new guys learn Fortran every year than to rewrite a 200k line code base in some other language that offers few or no real advantages outside of personal preference.
Could the advantage be not having to train a small number of folks on some system no one wants to use and has very little utility outside of a few small things?
I’m legitimately asking. I don’t code at all. So, for all I know the answer could be “no.”
That’s not a bad question! If it were the case that Fortran was a language that had very little utility outside of a few small things that no one wants to use, the cost of training people would eventually surpass the one-time cost of a rewrite.
As it stands however, Fortran is still a perfectly viable language if you know how to use it, and (one of) the de-facto standard in quite a few environments. So even if you re-wrote the code base, your new guys would still probably have to learn it in order to use some common libraries and tools.
Also, it’s hard to overestimate the complexity in this kind of re-write. We’re talking about a lot of code that is written for performance rather than readability, and where the documentation for the algorithms typically is “that article”.
Thanks! Makes sense to me.
My parents met in a Fortran class in college.
Guess that’s an indicator for the language being much less interesting than your parents thought each other were.
I don’t know. My dad is only slightly more interesting than a stack of punch cards, and I love him for that.
There could be a version of this where it hands out Bubble, Merge, Quick, and Bogo. It is, after all, the Sorting Hat :-P
Pity the poor bastard that gets RPG. I still have nightmares about that damned column decoder sheet.
Are you talking about role playing games or rocket propelled grenades? And why would the latter be the topic of comp sci classes?
At least it wasn’t COBOL
COBOL has job security
Not to mention what you can charge being one of the few people who can still write COBOL
Writing the COBOL probably isn’t the hard part. Reading 60 year old code that had to run in 16k of core to figure out what slice of business logic it contributes… yeah.
I used to laugh about COBOL, who can take it seriously, right? But now that I’m working in a larger company I can assure you that COBOL is the backbone of large industry. Aviation, finance, railway operations, insurance, you name it. We’re talking software running nonstop for decades.
this is what happens when you are hired for the first time out of school
Not just in programming, either. Your first job out of school can aim your career path in directions you didn’t expect.
COLD FUSION
(One of those is a real ColdFusion tag. Can you guess which one?)
I’d be happier to be a fortran programmer than a java programmer tbh. It’s a great language.
To be honest, the first draft of this had the Shakespeare Programming Language in the last panel but the test audience (ie my co writer) had never heard about that one, so I changed it to something that wasn’t necessarily bad but rather just old and no longer really in use.
except it is still used a lot
Then just take this first draft (in German, but you know what they’re saying) and assume that to be canon instead.
so nice! Thanks for sharing :)
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