Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

My father is 75 and he still works, has his own software development company with his own back-office program written in cobol. He started a company back in 1991 with two other cobol programmers, they are retired now, and while almost all of the code they wrote has been replaced with c# code by younger programmers there are still some parts of the code written in cobol that he still maintains.

Random OT question: I was raised by, erm, relatively uneducated folks. Is there anything especially great about having a software programmer for a father? (As my kids have one)

Having your kids also be technical and bail you out of the shit you've built for yourself. Or at least nudge you away from bad ideas, do listen to them.

I'm being a little unkind to my Dad. He moved to management fairly early on and didn't really keep up with things.

He taught me a hell of a lot though, and did really know his shit at one point. It worries me how much his skills and understanding have declined over the years.

They may eventually learn the valuable skill of politely smiling and nodding as someone talks with great passion about things with zero relevance to their day-to-day life, assuming they don't shut up about it at home.

Actually, tbf, my daughter's pretty interested in my coding and electronics projects. She picks things up alarmingly fast. I taught her a practically-one-way encoding scheme for passwords I've had incredible trouble teaching anyone else (LLMs also can't figure it out), and she completely understood it after the second example I gave and even added her own extra twist to it. Her passwords now are both memorable and extremely secure against dictionary attacks even with any mutation scheme someone could reasonably imagine.

-So I think that should probably go in the plus column.