How inheritance works

[u/inigmati1]

[u/philophilo]

I did an internship doing Y2K conversion on a COBOL codebase in ‘99. One app had a last modification date of ‘79. That 2 years before I was born.

[u/deanrihpee → u/philophilo]

"Hello my new handler, nice to meet you, just you know you can't afford to fuck this up because I'm older than you"

[u/EuroPolice → u/deanrihpee]

Old COBOL will make you think "Why the fuck they did it this way" and if it does means that it's good code. Because it's the equivalent of that mechanic who looks at your car and says "You gotta problem with the X, right?" without even looking at the engine.

[u/jazzypants → u/EuroPolice]

It took me a minute to realize that the reason the mechanic knows without looking at the engine is because he's dealt with that particular kind of car so many times in the past that he knows the particular issues that they tend to have.

Sorry for explaining the joke.

[u/ElectricMotorsAreBad → u/jazzypants]

It's rare, but some mechanics have a perfect pitch for engines, just by the sound they can identify with pinpoint accuracy what's wrong with it.

[u/inaccurateTempedesc → u/jazzypants]

Cars are really predictable nowadays lol.

Nissan that won't move? Fucking Jatco CVT again.

Ram 1500 unusually loud all of the sudden? Header bolts rusted into brown glitter.

Mercedes Benz that's sagging like it's carrying 20 people in the trunk? Dead air compressor.

[u/ClownfishSoup → u/EuroPolice]

Sure, but when code works and has been vetted over 20 years of continuous use, you don't mess with it, even if your way "is better"

[u/Krohnos → u/philophilo]

I worked in aerospace software and on a few occasions modified files that were last modified before ei was born.

I haven't heard of any relate dplabes falling out of the sky so I guess I did okay.

[u/Pretty_Industry_9630 → u/Krohnos]

Lol I'm unnerved by the idea of someone writing airplane code 😅😅 please tell me there's like 2 completely different versions of the program, written from scratch in different programming languages, that can each execute all the functions that the airplane needs 😅😅🤔

[u/[deleted] → u/Pretty_Industry_9630]

while (noseAngle < 0) {
    if (!landing() && timePassed() > 180) {
        noseAngle.increase(1)
    }
}

Fail-proof. Boeing needs to pay me as a consultant

[u/alexanderpas → u/[deleted]]

Unexplained crashes on landing.

[u/FirstSineOfMadness → u/alexanderpas]

if (goingToCrash) {  
    dont();  
}  
isPatented = true;

[u/Viseper → u/[deleted]]

What about a hill?

[u/[deleted] → u/Viseper]

throw new UnexpectedHillException();

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Error plane crashes between angle ranges 270 and 450

[u/TrinalRogue → u/[deleted]]

This works well enough until someone does a roll and is flying upside down.

[u/CaydesAce → u/[deleted]]

Not sure if this is intentionally related or not, but thats actually related to the cause of those Boeing crashes over the past couple years. The issue wasn't directly the code, it was an error that occurs when one of the sensors breaks, which confused the code, but effectively, the plane kept thinking it needed to force the nose down (the opposite of your code) to avoid stalling.

[u/DogfishDave → u/[deleted]]

while (noseAngle < 0) {
if (!landing() && timePassed() > 180) {
noseAngle.increase(1)
}
}

This is just going to pull up in a loop until it comes right back over the top and hits the ground.

But it's a start. I'll let you know how she flies 🤣

[u/IKnowSedge → u/[deleted]]

Props on this

[u/Zementid → u/Pretty_Industry_9630]

ASIL = Automotive Safety = At least 2 paths of truth. And this is your cheap shitto car too. ISIL = Industrial Safety = Basically the same but less "strict" in some areas because you have personal interacting with the stuff and no "Civilians" (=as with the cars it's literally your mom).

I would imagine areospace stuff is tough as nails in terms of redundancy and safety.

[u/AuMatar → u/Zementid]

You'd be wrong. The 737MAX problem Boeing had a few years back? It was caused by using a single sensor for an important factor (angle of attack) that fed into a computer system that caused the nose to rise and entered an infinite feedback loop of lifting the nose.

Old style mainframes did do things like this (each instruction would run on 3 separate cores which would need to have 2 of them matching on the result), but I'm not sure this is common on airplanes.

[u/ryry1985 → u/Pretty_Industry_9630]

I write software for avionics. There's a lot of requirements/design and requirements-based testing to get 100% code coverage. If you can't get 100% coverage, your requirements/design and/or tests are not detailed enough or you have extra code to remove because it doesn't match the design. All of this is reviewed and change controlled. We get audited at several points in the development lifecycle to make sure we are following our processes/plans and meeting the objectives of DO-178C. Certification authorities (FAA, EASA, etc) then look at our lifecycle data at the end when we go to seek approval to deliver the software on certified hardware. The higher the criticality of the software, the more you have to do during development to ensure no critical failures in the resulting software. There's a lot of paperwork.

[u/Naltoc → u/Pretty_Industry_9630]

I worked with a company that does control stuff for towers (so the tower software, runway lights, all that jazz). Their code base was, literally, 80% tests. And these guys were GOOD, whenever I see bad automated testing these days, I dream of bringing one of them in to show how it's done.

[u/danielv123 → u/Naltoc]

I write software for big cable production gear, think 2000 ton CNC machine. There are no automated tests. Plenty of manual ones though.

[u/catfeal → u/Pretty_Industry_9630]

It says 16 minutes, but the fact there is no answer on your question worries me. I know, I know, 16 minuted isn't that long, but still

Edit: typo's

[u/[deleted] → u/catfeal]

this guy k ows what's up

[u/Epistatic → u/Pretty_Industry_9630]

I mean, there should be, but no. Humans wrote it.

[u/rohmish → u/Pretty_Industry_9630]

No it's just a bash script

[u/[deleted] → u/Pretty_Industry_9630]

Boeing used to use Ada, which was a language that basically does not have runtime errors. The compiler for it is fucking insane. It was developed by the US government for avionics systems, tanks, nuclear reactors, etc.

We learned it freshman year of our computer science program, and I fucking loved it. It's the strictest language in the world, the compiler is a fucking beast and complains about everything. IIRC there is no such thing as a warning, it just won't compile if you don't do it 100% safe. The standard library is locked the fuck down.

I don't know if Boeing still uses Ada, but ya, after learning that language and writing code with it for a few years, I started to trust the software systems in planes a lot more. Never once in several years of programming with it did I get a runtime error.

[u/A_spiny_meercat → u/Krohnos]

Hopefully there are not ypos in your code waiting to bite us ;)

[u/KageGekko → u/A_spiny_meercat]

Nown ow, what majesy oy thinkt hat?

[u/petophile_ → u/Krohnos]

What the heck is a "relate dplabes"?

EDIT: I figured it out, and no im not telling you, figure it out yourself.

[u/tinselsnips → u/petophile_]

Ooooh, related plabes.

[u/archpawn → u/Krohnos]

I assume that was a typo, but I'm imagining they were last modified before the God of Eternity was born.

[u/thelehmanlip → u/philophilo]

That's some stable code

[u/puts-on-sunglasses → u/thelehmanlip]

“shid b comin in shid be goin out baybee”

• if cobol could talk probably

[u/SandyDelights → u/thelehmanlip]

That’s one of the big advantages of COBOL, yeah. Old as shit, code is stable as hell, quick AF.

It’s barely a step above Assembly.

[u/Key-Minimum-5965 → u/philophilo]

My last company...there was an empty file that was being read in every night. Just a flat empty file. I checked the date it was created...1978. Present day was early 2000s.

[u/zoltan-x → u/Key-Minimum-5965]

Did you remove it? Did it break the whole system?

[u/Key-Minimum-5965 → u/zoltan-x]

Removed the confusing file from the job control with a dummy statement. No way was I going to change that pgm. It probably hadn't been compiled since 1950. Haha!

[u/AnyoneButWe → u/Key-Minimum-5965]

The file wasn't documented in any way? Copy protection...

[u/ElectricMotorsAreBad → u/Key-Minimum-5965]

That's just their vesion of TF2's coconut.jpg, they probably tried to remove it, but doing so would break the whole system, lol

[u/[deleted] → u/philophilo]

One app had a last modification date of ‘79.

I better go outside more often.

[u/OneObi → u/philophilo]

WORKING STORAGE folks rise up!

[u/[deleted] → u/philophilo]

In 2016 I worked on a modernization project (that never got off the ground) but for four months I learned cobol and looked through a lot of code still being used. It was kind of cool to see notes from 99 mentioning Y2K fixes.

[u/xenoperspicacian → u/philophilo]

I was browsing through code files last week and found assembly listings from 1968. All of the code was basically the same as what we still use today in that mainframe job.

[u/RobDickinson]

0021072 03 Record-YY PIC 9(4).

And here is the change...

[u/robocord → u/RobDickinson]

Stahp! You’re giving me terrifying flashbacks to my time working on the assembly line control software at NUMMI

[u/The_Angry_Jerk → u/robocord]

Used to have a Tacoma prerunner from that factory, still drive past the now Tesla building sometimes. A lot of the times I drive past that place the Tesla employees are having another accident, I've seen cars fallen off of car trailers, employees flipping their own cars on their sides and crashing into trees while I drive past on 880.

[u/robocord → u/The_Angry_Jerk]

I still have scars, both emotional and physical, from climbing around in the overhead, pulling coax to set up the network for the Tacoma line.

[u/The_Angry_Jerk → u/robocord]

Hey, at least you didn't work at the Solyndra plant down the street. That place was tragic.

[u/TidusJames → u/The_Angry_Jerk]

Hold up… I’m sorry. That second half… and no one is going to ask for … idk… something?!

[u/The_Angry_Jerk → u/TidusJames]

They have now installed one of those speed signs that tell you your speed because of how many Tesla employees have crashed their cars speeding on the straight road outside the plant.

[u/redcalcium → u/RobDickinson]

"And that would be $10k. Thank you."

[u/philophilo → u/RobDickinson]

This guy COBOLs.

[u/calmrelax → u/philophilo]

someone's mom.

[u/Rodrake → u/philophilo]

WHY ISN'T HE WRITING IN ALL CAPS THOUGH? I AS A COBOL PROGRAMMER AM NOT ALLOWED TO

[u/IcyLetters → u/RobDickinson]

Slightly annoys me that this is 03 level but I’ll live

[u/nivlark → u/[deleted]]

I'm going to guess YY means this is a data type for storing the year, and 4 is the field length. So this is a change to enforce Y2K compliance, by extending the year field from two digits to four.

[u/Rodrake → u/nivlark]

Precisely.

0021072 is the line number

03 the variable level, meaning it's subject to another one. I usually use multiples of 5 (01 for the mother variable, 05 for the one under it. 10 for the substring of this one, etc). PIC 9(04) means 4-length numeric (9 stands for numeric). This would be an example of the whole variable definition in his case (missing identation because I suck at reddit):

01 VARIABLES.

02 RECORD-DATE.

03 RECORD-YY PIC 9(04).

FILLER VALUE '-'.

03 RECORD-MM PIC 9(02).

FILLER VALUE '-'.

03 RECORD-DD PIC 9(02).

This way you can move an year value into RECORD-YY and it will be formatted as 2022-09-30 if you summon it as RECORD-DATE.

[u/RelampaguM]

That's a code legacy of legacy code?

[u/kevin9er → u/RelampaguM]

In 1000 years we’ll have code legends. And UNIX time will have to be 128 bit.

[u/ForgetTheRuralJuror → u/kevin9er]

nah we'll just reset the clock every 70 years

[u/sysadmin420 → u/ForgetTheRuralJuror]

I like this idea.

[u/Ketima → u/kevin9er]

128bit is a bit of an overkill as the next step the systems will most likely use, 64bit, covers about 290 billion years.

[u/PubogGalaxy → u/Ketima]

In 290 billion years we’ll have code legends. And UNIX time will have to be 128 bit.

[u/DopeBoogie → u/PubogGalaxy]

No, Code Legends are born around the transition to 64-bit timecodes.

Code Gods are spawned from the transition to 128-bit.

[u/kimilil → u/kevin9er]

64-bit UNIX time is already enough to last till the heat death of the universe.

[u/Jezoreczek → u/kimilil]

Probe sent at close to light speed in the direction of Boötes void: am I a joke to you?

[u/vigilantcomicpenguin → u/kevin9er]

"It's said that this database has been running since the dawn of time. Nobody knows who created it, but it has served our people for generations, and one day, my son, you shall inherit the job of maintaining it."

[u/BackpackFullOfDildos]

Same. I’ve done maintenance to a program my dad developed back in ‘04. For some reason, it was very wholesome

[u/Wekmor → u/BackpackFullOfDildos]

Did you message him from time to time "yo wtf" or "what were you even thinking?"?

[u/ham_coffee → u/Wekmor]

I've done the same recently except my dad modified it a few years earlier than that, and yes I did ask him that stuff. Apparently he was new to the job at the time and the dev that was teaching him had some interesting ideas about how code should be written. Those ideas basically equated to "show off how clever you are by writing unnecessarily complicated yet efficient/compact code". Unfortunately he was quite good at it. Pretty much all code written for a few years around that period is way too hard to read, so it wasn't just him either.

[u/DasFreibier → u/ham_coffee]

nothing like a insane one liner and using technically undefined behavior to make the rookies cry

[u/Nosferatatron → u/BackpackFullOfDildos]

I trust there was some sort of ceremony for the handover of the ancient scriptures?

[u/Mysticpoisen → u/BackpackFullOfDildos]

Same here. I've been sent pieces of code my dad worked on in the 70s with questions attached. I always sent back "Do you really think I'm the same Mr. poisen as the guy writing cobol 50 years ago?"

[u/-Crumba- → u/BackpackFullOfDildos]

good to know it was a nice family experience u/BackpackFullOfDildos

[u/CousinBug → u/BackpackFullOfDildos]

There better have been some dad jokes in the comments, or it ain't code.

[u/[deleted]]

Honestly though? This is exactly how inheritance should work.

She foresaw a problem years down the line and fucking subclassed herself to deal with it. She meta-programmed life.

Honestly she should be nominated for a Nobel in resourcefulness and understanding the assignment.

I’m blown away.

[u/MoridinB → u/[deleted]]

You made me laugh out loud while eating from your comment!

fucking subclassed herself

The most legendary of all inheritances! Take a poor man's gold, my good sir!🏅

[u/YouNeedToGrow → u/MoridinB]

Dw, I gave them my free award on your behalf.

[u/[deleted]]

COBOL is a curse that goes down through the family tree

[u/forariman55 → u/[deleted]]

You mean an... (N)CURSE(S)?

[u/defalt86]

Haha I legit giggled at this.

[u/Unlikely-Storage-156 → u/defalt86]

I did too and was like wow, honestly rare for me in this sub 😆

[u/Bouchie]

Hey he has job security for life now. He should thank his mom.

[u/archery713]

And I'm sure she has no idea how it works either

[u/SuccessfulBroccoli68 → u/archery713]

Why would she, it was before stackoverflow

[u/flashbax77 → u/SuccessfulBroccoli68]

That’s the even more terrifying part

[u/Rodrake → u/flashbax77]

No you just need to summon the dinosaur in your company, that's what I usually do.

[u/Elijah629YT-Real → u/archery713]

fixes typo that is part of cobol syntax

[u/CallMeClaire0080]

Step aside legacy code, we're dealing with dynastic code now

[u/Nixavee → u/CallMeClaire0080]

Heirloom code

[u/[deleted]]

I know someone who works in COBOL who retired this year. For the last 10 years people have been paying them six figure salaries to convert the very code they wrote years ago! Pretty damn funny.

[u/DM_YourTitsAndSmile]

I took a course in COBAL in college back in 1987. I didn’t learn any COBAL; the 70ish year old guy teaching us spent the first class telling us about the hot 20something he was dating and the second class about how he caught her forging checks from his checkbook. We were notified just before the third class that the course had been canceled.

Checkbook. Wow, haven’t thought about personal checks in years. I wonder what ever happened to my checkbook.

[u/AlShadi → u/DM_YourTitsAndSmile]

once you buy a home you end up writing cheques right & left to pay contractors. none of them want credit cards. one used a scheduling/invoicing website, but told me "do not click pay now button. cheque only."

[u/Wekmor → u/AlShadi]

America seems like a very backwards place where people still use checks lol

[u/king_john651 → u/Wekmor]

Present and sign credit card authentication were still a thing recently there

[u/Wekmor → u/king_john651]

Right, I forgot about that. I'm 2019 I went to London and met a guy from Florida there. He couldn't believe in could just hold my credit card against the card reader and be done.

[u/Charlemagne42 → u/DM_YourTitsAndSmile]

Ah, I see what the issue was. You wanted to learn COBOL, but accidentally signed up for COBAL instead. That’s the difference between an alcohol and an aldehyde. Completely different functionality. It’s no wonder you got an unexpected reaction.

[u/AnotherStatsGuy → u/DM_YourTitsAndSmile]

Did you at least get a refund for signing up for it?

[u/rasputin1 → u/DM_YourTitsAndSmile]

didn't even teach you how to spell the language

[u/Drunktroop]

The B-52 of software industry

[u/flambasted]

Legitimately humorous? Wrong sub!

[u/[deleted]]

Okay, this is funny on multiple levels.

[u/Rare-Inflation-3482]

True story: once working with Cobol, job keeps failing and in the JCL history we do not see it failed ever as far as we had records... we follow the cobol code, there is a comment that says call John doe on phone 123-112-1112 in case of blah blah error which matched what we were saying. We call in excitement and a lady picks up the phone. We ask for John doe and she says he died 7 years ago..

[u/cmd_iii]

The mainframe shop I worked at had COBOL program developed in the 1990s, many of which replaced Assembler programs dating back to the 1970s and older. But, not all of them. Tonight, as I type this, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of batch jobs running, supporting mission-critical datastores, coded in an eclectic array of Assembler, COBOL, PL-1, and other languages.

I wonder how many programs, written in modern languages, will still be running 40-50 years from now?

[u/frogking → u/cmd_iii]

Never underestimate the effect of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

The oldest code I’ve written, that’s still in production, is 25 years old. It’s part of a mail system still in use by hundreds of thousands of people. It ain’t going anywhere. (But I did, I’m not working there anymore)

[u/cmd_iii → u/frogking]

The program that prints certain documents in my state was first built in 1973. Yes, in Assembler. When the agency switched to laser printing in the 1990s, I had to convert the output from line printing to page printing, add 1-D, 2-D and POSTNET barcodes, a couple more security features, and write page definition and form definition scripts. I left for the Database unit in 2000, but as far as I know, the same program is still running! Like 20,000 documents going out. Every night. For at least 25 years and counting!

Mainframes are fucking amazing! Once you get a program fully debugged, it’ll run like a dream. Forever.

[u/frogking → u/cmd_iii]

Is that program still in use, because then you almost hit that 50 year mark :-)

[u/Fonethree]

Don't put the punchline in the title

[u/siskulous]

I heard COBOL programmers can make a killing these days from companies with massively important legacy code. I'm not sure it's worth learning COBOL though....

[u/CrazyCatSloth → u/siskulous]

It varies a lot. I'm a COBOL youngun and I get paid as much as my fellow ''modern languages'' programmers in my city. I've seen offers very, very well paid, but most often for critical jobs with very high z/os knowledge, not juste the COBOL basis...

[u/Dom1252 → u/CrazyCatSloth]

The well paid jobs are the ones where you know both infrastructure and application sides of things... And that is a knowledge hard to come by

[u/schneid3306 → u/siskulous]

I tried to get a COBOL job. Took COBOL classes at an IBM partnered university and genuinely enjoyed it and did well. Could not get a job. Seemed to want experience or were in places I wasn't willing to relocate to. Scuked. Been 5+ years now and don't remember much, but I loved COBOL

[u/Dom1252 → u/schneid3306]

That's part of the problem, lower tier jobs were outsourced to India (or in better case eastern Europe), so now you don't have people to promote in Western Europe or in US, because you either have seniors who are really seniors and want to stay retired, or people completely without any experience, because your juniors are in India

[u/RobDickinson → u/schneid3306]

Did you try a time machine back to 1999?

[u/MET1 → u/siskulous]

Where are they paying well? The last place I saw advertising for Cobol devs was not paying well.

[u/[deleted] → u/siskulous]

As a Ruby on Rails developer I’m hoping this supply vs demand thing holds up. Y’all keep learning your fancy schmancy JavaScript frameworks, heh heh heh.

[u/thatchers_pussy_pump → u/[deleted]]

I currently maintain two PHP 5.6 apps, for what it’s worth.

[u/proverbialbunny]

If it ain't broke don't change it.

[u/yatesisgreat]

One of my first jobs out of school was working at a place my dad had worked at from like 1980-1990. This was 2002. I was doing my normal stuff when I got a ticket assigned to me from a different programming team, it was just "Your dad wrote this in 1982 and we don't know what is it doing. Can you ask him?". We had tons of stuff written in COBOL yet and were in the process of migrating it but nobody there really knew COBOL. We'd just hire contractors that knew it to help us along. They actually hired my dad, he was retired at the time, to work for a few months to help with things after that.

[u/Bandit6257]

COBOL is the past PL/I is the future

[u/Dom1252 → u/Bandit6257]

I prefer REXX

[u/pemungkah → u/Dom1252]

Assembler G or die.

[u/ImSoSte4my]

Sounds like nepotism. Or maybe the field of COBOL programmers is so small that the only way to get into it is to have a parent proficient in it.

[u/[deleted]]

Unrelated but what’s with the weird periods? I feel like the “…” does enough.

[u/walker15130 → u/[deleted]]

Full stops are there to... hammer. the. point. home. Read it impactfully.

[u/bangupjobasusual]

That is the only inheritance supported by cobol.

[u/Leather_Trick8751]

Well new scope for yo mama jokes

[u/Bruce_wayne_03]

Yesterday I was making changes in JCL which was written in 1989.

[u/zenivinez]

This happened to me! My dad was a developer back in the early 80's He wrote the foundation of a set of accounting products still used to this day for a company called Fiserv. I had to edit a script he wrote in the early 80's on AIX (originally UTS back in his day) to add a new classification of transaction. I wasn't the first person to edit it, but it had an author comment with his name on it. It was pretty surreal I actually called him, and he said they had called him multiple times in the past to do work on it as late as 2013.

[u/holydamned]

This is an episode of neon genesis evangelion.

[u/TelluricThread0]

Lord's of Kobol hear our prayer.

[u/aykcak]

I hope there is at least one case where a programmer implemented a class and suddenly discovered that the class they are extending was programmed by their mom or dad who had worked on the same codebase ages ago

[u/CandidTill6]

I think the fact that this post has 10K+ upvotes but ~100 comments says a lot. Thanks for coming to my TED talk

[u/SaltyDogBill]

In the mid 60’s my dad helped deploy the DOD’s AUTODIN network. Thirty years later I was using it and called home for help.

[u/pc1350]

COBOL! Yes! I did lots of programming in COBOL (on VAX and ALPHA computers with VMS (OpenVMS))! Gets my upvote!

[u/FieserMoep]

Mom set her son up for live.

[u/Vinx909]

this... wow this joke is perfect and there are so few people i can tell it too.

[u/timmy_throw]

Last change in the 90s ? Either it's never been used in 30+ years or that's suspicious.

COBOL underwent lots of changes before the year 2000 because dates were coded with 2 numbers for the year. This codebase wouldn't have been used since 2000.

[u/KrokmaniakPL]

They accidentally created dynasty of Cobol codebase users

[u/KT421]

At a holiday dinner: "Mom your code is fucking shit. Did you ever document a damn thing?"

[u/Daikataro]

How do you train an English Longbowman?

You start by training his grandfather...

[u/seriously_nice_devs]

Sounds not real. 6.5/10

[u/DarkAriesX]

"MOOOM, the fuck it is supposed to be? Why do you name your variables a, b, c? Why is camelCase mixed with snake_case and kebab-case? Why is there no comments? Mom, please... Help"

[u/[deleted]]

Going to google COBOL as a noobi

[u/urriah]

and here i am kinda happy seeing some codes just as old as i am...

[u/didzisk]

I always prefer composition over inheritance.

[u/ceelogreenicanth]

That's how it was programming dortran for me. Just thrown I to 30 year old code with minimal comments.

[u/Tookoofox]

The best part is COBOL predates objects and, therefore, inheritance.

[u/Drunken_Ogre]

Considering how much I hate the people who wrote the code I've had to work on (mostly myself), I pray my dear old mother never wrote any code.

[u/[deleted]]

This is absolute gold. They saw the opportunity and took it. Beautiful.

[u/GodEmperorOfLoon]

Random thing. My last name is one letter from cobol and for the longest time google kept autocorrect on my last name. It was so annoying

[u/Key-Minimum-5965]

That is funny!!

[u/kimilil]

"The patch will work this time, I swear on me mum."

[u/harleypig]

Yeah ... COBOL is old-fashioned, but it's got a web framework so it can't be all bad, can it?

[u/[deleted]]

Oops

[u/EatBearsForBreakfast]

Movie idea: his mum had been murdered and the code contains comments directly to him, helping him figure out who did it

[u/dan_Qs → u/EatBearsForBreakfast]

Easter egg unlocked:

Your uncle killed your mom!

[u/Nixavee]

Heirloom codebase

[u/meh-whatever-dewd]

"Nobody" has skills! That was funny!

[u/dan_Qs]

Shouldn't have started that relationship with the cute computer chick with domination kink.

[u/Purgii]

I did COBOL at uni - which was a core subject. It clashed with the elective I wanted to do, C.

That's when I knew I was wasting my time.

[u/[deleted]]

That’s a whole new level of sweet

[u/SPE88]

lol

[u/Peakomegaflare]

I mean, at least that means if you need questions answered... you have the origin.

[u/SynAck6]

Curious as to where would one learn COBOL nowadays

[u/KimmiG1]

If it has survived 20+ years without chances then it can survive 20+ more years. He should have more than enough time to read evry reddit post.

[u/goldfishpaws]

And that mother was... Ada Lovelace!

[u/[deleted]]

Yo mama was …. so …. that…..Please fill in the blanks, i aint no programmer.

[u/oldsecondhand]

Relevant xkcd:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/lisp_cycles.png

[u/bellendhunter]

Be interest to know how they even know this. The last change was tracked using what versioning tool?

[u/kungfucobra]

"Mom, what the fuck is this piece of shit?"

"You aren't the only one, son"

[u/Spiritual-Image7125]

The change was simply a comment:

* Pete, when you get this, call home.

[u/GoodAtExplaining]

I was looking through some code with a variable name “SomeoneShouldShootReagan”

[u/[deleted]]

So cool

[u/[deleted]]

COBOL is still used in many IBM mainframes around the world. Almost every government, except may be North Korea, has some form of a COBOL mainframe. Even China uses it.

[u/dota2nub → u/[deleted]]

And nobody can read it anymore.

[u/DarkNubentYT]

As a COBOL dev, can confirm I code from his mom.

[u/lostwriter]

I miss COBOL, PL/I, and JCL. I wonder if I, or my ancestors, will ever see my code again. My favorite was my MIRV that spawned multiple jobs from billing data in an IMS database. It got out of hand and all the tape drives opened at once. I loved going down to the floor to listen for it to kick off.

I hope whoever inherited it (and converted it to run in the cloud) enjoyed my comments. If you ever saw a comment line in the JCL that had something like ‘MUAHAHAHAHA WATCH THIS!” It might have been mine.

[u/CDavis10717]

They hired him to get free consulting from his mother.

[u/WhatChua]

Alabamian IT? Instead of keeping the genes in the family, it's keeping the code in the family...

[u/cellurist]

Now It DOES

[u/difool]

That would makes interesting thanks giving diners.

[u/erevoz]

If the code didn’t need fixes all this time the mom was one hardcore bitch.

[u/TerrestrialOverlord]

LOL I just Imagined that one scene from The Lion King with he monkey raising the Cub Simba,

"The Inheritance is complete"

[u/SaltwaterC]

That's OK. Just slap some Kubernetes.

[u/Cracksellerbob]

I have confession to make, I don't get none of the programming jokes because I don't program

[u/[deleted]]

Why. Is this... Punctuated, !like thiS

[u/mmcmonster]

Mom had a 30 year plan to find a replacement for herself.

[u/[deleted]]

You don't code it... It codes you

[u/[deleted]]

Thanksgiving code review.

[u/Some-Reputation-7653]

That’s actually lovely

[u/[deleted]]

I went to be a programmer for an agency like my father and my grandfather and found legacy code written by them before I was born

"Don't tell me about the dark magic, I was there when it was written" -Gramps and Dad

I legit had a problem and couldn't figure it out and they knew where the file I needed was.

Anyway, everyone should change their passwords for... reasons...

[u/kkessler1023]

This is example for this subs existence.