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

234 points _false | 1 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | 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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perakojotgenije ◴[18 Jul 25 15:51 UTC] No.44606132[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>44606907 #
coryrc ◴[18 Jul 25 16:47 UTC] No.44606907[source]▶
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)
replies(2): >>44607421 #>>44614402 #
1. kldg ◴[19 Jul 25 10:57 UTC] No.44614402[source]▶
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.