IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Neranja said:

Suit yourself, I will probably maintaining ancient FORTRAN code. I mean COBOL is bad, but If you really want to have nightmares you should read some of the code engineers wrote.

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COBOL really isn't that bad, it's just you don't have an IDE (Eclipse Rational Developer plugin doesn't integrate with enough existing technology), so you're probably stuck using an ISPF, which is like a structured Command Line, and a lack of any standard library support, doesn’t have garbage collection, or strong memory protection (some weird shit can happen when messing with raw memory on occasion).

Otherwise, it's a reasonably designed language, especially more recent iterations. For example, the original COBOL pretty much only used Periods as Scope Terminators, and they would subsequently completely drop you out of a routine, but now we have level specific terminators, and honestly it just makes more sense to end an IF with an END-IF, than layering squiggly brackets by column (granting IDE's make up the difference for that deficiency). It's definitely got it's quirks like Divisions, e.g. WORKING STORAGE...so no local variables (which is NOT the same as Global Variables, only linkage/passed parms reach the next program). Like some people get concerned with Column based syntax, but after a month or so, you barely have to give it a passing thought.

There are two languages on the mainframe, that I will disparage. JCL which is a beast and Assembler (not x86 Assembly, although same premise), which I fucking hate working on Assembler, tedious, arduous.

Job Control Language evolved organically, and as a result it's a mess, and there's a 100 ways to do a thing, and different styles of syntax which are all valid...until they're not valid. I have never worked with a Mainframe guy, who ever claimed to be a guru in JCL, and even though given how much they had, and I have at this point, one would argue that I am; I know there's so much I still really don't quite understand about it, that while I can very comfortable work and build my own, I'm usually using previous references and, forbid I run into a system JCL with voodoo in it...man. There is something to be said about running a job, where you've to manage your own disk space...nowadays, you can actually zero out sizes for the most part and it will auto fill, but even so you're often determining the Track / Cylinder size et. al.

Who is our resident Assembly guy, is it LurkingDirk or Noodleface? Ugh, fucking Assembler (Z O/S)...working in that shit heap, building Green Screens (screen maps), trying to debug...

TJT said:

Code that they do not understand in the slightest and cannot even read without a summarized AI prompt explaining to them what a bunch of code lines are doing.

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I feel like that actually happened maybe 10-15 years ago based on the responses I get (or don't get) any time I ask for a query or piece of logic outside of my silo.

I've been maintaining recently that yes we will get these vibe coders, but the technical experts and the people that know how to manage them are going to be more needed than ever.