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jimmydean

jimmydean

The Official Meat of Ridemonkey
Sep 10, 2001
43,009
15,099
Portland, OR
Westy said:
I used to be a wiz with Fortran for numerical solutions. What used to take days of programming and 12 hours to run can be done with a basic Matlab command and solved in milliseconds.
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If you show desire, work will send you to a 6 week Cobol bootcamp. They need it so bad they will pay you to learn it for 6 weeks. :panic:
 
jstuhlman

jstuhlman

bagpipe wanker
Dec 3, 2009
17,319
14,129
Cackalacka du Nord
tonights flight cancelled. hung with fun friends, got a decent room, went to a spot that had big maine beer co bottles. rebooked on 10:00AM tomorrow. notbad.
 
jimmydean

jimmydean

The Official Meat of Ridemonkey
Sep 10, 2001
43,009
15,099
Portland, OR
For reference:

Old Programmers Are Dying Off ... And Taking Their Computer Languages With Them

As far as we're concerned, computers are magic. We don't know the technical details of what goes down when we order a book from Amazon or stream truly shocking amounts of pornography, and frankly, we don't want to. That's why we have computer programmers. They do all the important behind-the-scenes work that lets us take complicated technology for granted, and they give us someone to complain about when that technology fails and we can't stream Gilmore Girls on our toaster at three in the morning.

But there's a problem: An enormous amount of our financial data is stored on systems still running ancient programming. Roughly three trillion dollars a day runs through computers still operating on COBOL, a language that was developed in 1959. Everything from ATMs to credit card networks to mortgage payments rely on a system that makes calculator watches look like absurd science fiction. And the majority of people who know how to fix the many problems with COBOL are getting ready to meet their programmers.

It's not as simple as moving everything onto a more modern infrastructure. At this point, the financial system is so intertwined with its COBOL roots that it would be like trying to simultaneously replace all of your veins with fiber optics. A switchover is theoretically possible, but if something goes wrong, the financial data for millions of people could vanish.

Since it would be impractical to make everyone temporarily withdraw all of their money until the problem is fixed, geriatric programmers are making good money running firms that specialize in COBOL. Meanwhile, the industry is rushing to train young programmers (and rehire the old guys they fired because they thought their skills were obsolete). Further compounding the problem is that programmers of the original COBOL systems rarely wrote handbooks, and deciphering someone else's computer code 40 years later is like trying to communicate an elaborate sexual fantasy via slide whistles.

And it's not only banking. NASA once desperately needed to find programmers who knew Fortran to communicate with their Voyager probes. These are by no means insurmountable problems, so don't panic and put all of your money in Dogecoins tomorrow. But it's kind of like suddenly discovering that we have to teach thousands of people Latin to prevent the English language book industry from collapsing.
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Toshi

Toshi

butthole powerwashing evangelist
Oct 23, 2001
39,682
8,711
Westy said:
I have no idea what is going on here, but it is funny.
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“Make yourself look like you’re on a fashion magazine cover” but without handling the case of a beard
 
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