11 Aug
2008
11 Aug
'08
8:29 a.m.
madodel wrote:
Just prior to y2k they were paying large bonuses to get C programmers
to learn COBOL so the 100s of millions of lines of code could be
checked and patched. Large companies were desperate. I'm sure a lot
of these folks were canned after 2000 when all the Y2K nonsense
finally ended but I'm sure they aren't all retired.
Sounds like what they really needed were rewrites, or perhaps
(automated) language translators; say from Cobol to Java. (I say Java
because the mindset of most corps out there is to hire the junior guys
since they see programmers as cogs and would want a cheap source of
labor, and since Java seems to be the Visual Basic of today, not so much
in language complexity but rather in terms of the pool of available kids
fresh out of college - as sad as that concept is... sigh...)
Of course there'd be a lot of manual labor involved in bringing things
up to standards as computer translated code is usually fuglier than the
original.