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

234 points _false | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

COBOL legacy systems in finance and government are somewhat of a meme. However, I've never actually met a single person who's day job is to maintain one. I'd be curious to learn what systems are you working on?
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slowmotiony ◴[18 Jul 25 14:08 UTC] No.44604809[source]▶
I work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there was no remote desktop back then.
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kazinator ◴[18 Jul 25 14:49 UTC] No.44605265[source]▶
PuTTY into Linux and you're in 16 colors.
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haiku2077 ◴[18 Jul 25 15:43 UTC] No.44606008[source]▶
My Linux terminal is 256 colors. Two hundred fifty six! That's like, every color!
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1. kragen ◴[18 Jul 25 17:22 UTC] No.44607407{3}[source]▶
24-bit color support (\033[38;2;rrr;ggg;bbbm) has been mainline in both Konsole and in libvte-based terminal emulators for many years. 16777216 colors. That's still not every color, but it's every color your monitor can display. When I wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gradient.c in 02016 I had it in Konsole but not libvte, though I think it had been added to libvte upstream. http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gradient.png

Color in terminal emulators was one of the main perks of Linux over other Unixes for me at first!

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2. haiku2077 ◴[18 Jul 25 19:02 UTC] No.44608549[source]▶
I intentionally use 256 colors mode because I prefer the vibe :)