COBOL joke from 1999:

A COBOL programmer, tired of all the extra work and chaos caused by the impending Y2K bug, decides to have himself cryogenically frozen for a year so he can skip all of it.

He gets himself frozen, and eventually is woken up when several scientists open his cryo-pod.

“Did I sleep through Y2K? Is it the year 2000?”, he asks.

The scientists nervously look at each other. Finally, one of them says “Actually, it’s the year 9999. We hear you know COBOL.”

  • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip
    19·
    17 hours ago

    If you ever plan to kidnap a COBOL developer, make sure to offer their employer a “double-rate same day delivery option” in the ransom.

  • Avicenna@programming.dev
    6·
    18 hours ago

    I feel like I have seen multiple such fight memes from this restaurant. What is going on there? Are they ok?

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
      10·
      16 hours ago

      It’s a meme video, there is an altercation in a McDonald’s, loud and violent, but the guy in the foreground continues eating completely nonplussed with big capybara energy about the punch-up going on next to him.

      • Avicenna@programming.dev
        1·
        8 hours ago

        I think I have seen versions from the same restaurant but another person sitting calmly. But maybe I am wrong

    • bearboiblake@pawb.socialEnglish
      15·
      16 hours ago

      As someone who knows COBOL, I’d say, don’t bother. People over exaggerate the availability and remuneration of COBOL jobs. Maybe they used to be well paid or there used to be lots of jobs, but it’s pretty much a myth these days.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        15 hours ago

        Well is that because everyone thinks they can get CodeGen to rewrite their COBOL stack and are gonna need someone to un-fuck their codebase in a few years? Because if so, that sounds like a great reason to learn COBOL.

    • jimmy90@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 hours ago

      there will be lots of systems in shit old languages being nursed along because nobody dare rewrite them because the engineering is so awful

      take your pick

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        because the engineering is so awful

        because the engineering was perfect and nobody has had to touch it since it was written

        Seriously, that’s why bank stuff still has COBOL stacks. It’s worked perfectly for like half a century.

    • lorty@lemmy.ml
      5·
      16 hours ago

      COBOL itself isn’t really that bad. It’s the lack of modern toolling you’d expect that will make you tear your hair apart. And also JCL. Fuck JCL.

    • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
      33·
      24 hours ago

      The language itself is not hard. It’s reading other people’s code written in it that is hard.

      So basically like any other programming language.