Lup Yuen Lee 李立源 @lupyuen@social.cleverlibre.org

@2ck @lupyuen agreed, not just lack of confidence. There's "if it works ... " mentally, for which I have some sympathy.

I suppose also it is also testament to how good COBOL and its programmers were that there systems still running. Would be interesting to see how many Java systems are running after the same length of time.

C'mon, any programmer "worth their salt" could easily devour a COBOL program.

When I think to some archaic languages I have to decipher on inherited systems I have had to look after, even C++ is a walk in the park.

1) download a better distro
2) burn better distro to disc
3) reboot after plugging in disc
4) uh...

@chrism @lupyuen While I agree that a software engineering team needs to have some people who understand all parts of the systems they maintain, I doubt it's *just* lack of confidence. Management may not be giving their engineers time and resources to learn their COBOL systems, even if those engineers know they should learn them.
(I would also push back on COBOL being one of the easiest to learn. Against the landscape of modern programming languages, COBOL is a real weirdo: full of cruft, bizarre conventions, and surprising edge cases.)

@chrism @lupyuen I can confirm one of the world’s largest insurance companies keep piling up Java “abstraction layers” on top of each other, on top of COBOL.

The last few people who understood how the lower layers work are hired back from retirement for several thousand euros a day when there is an emergency. When they are not dead already.