Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

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It's an odd phenomenon I've seen before. For some reason, execs think they need Java. I had one guy say that customers didn't want to hear cobol; so for him there was a marketing component. Otherwise, I think a lot of execs buy into the "cobol develoepers are rare and expensive" myth also put forth by this article. It's false; after 20 years of offshoring, there are 10,000s of unemployed cobol developers in the US. The shortage is cobol domain experts who wrote the original app, and who's jobs were offshored. That's the shortage.

Certainly there are cobol to jvm bytecode options and I'm sure they see some use. One other option I haven't seen yet is cobol to an intermediate DSL in Java that legacy developers could use and code with little trouble, Jobol if you will. This doesn't exist that I know of.

> 10,000s of unemployed cobol developers in the US.

You need to find that Cobol developper, that can work at your office, that will still works for at least the next 10 years, that won't ask a ton of cash because he expect to keep a similar salary as he did before, that is actually competent, etc...

In the other hands, you got 10 000 unemployed java developer that get out of school in less than 500 km around your office, every year, that will do the job nicely for a pretty cheap salary because it's their first job.

Aha. That's why they keep inventing new languages.

A fun fact - Java is over 23 years old. Don't know if anyone would call Java "new" anymore.

It's actually almost the same amount of time C-to-Java as Java-to-now.

Like just like stegosaurus and t-rex

And same amount of time Cobol-to-C?

C started in 1972 so no. Cobol is close but was only 13 years between it's appearance and C.

In all seriousness, I think there’s a ton of waste involving languages - each language introduces its own package manager, doesn’t interop with other languages meaning you have to rewrite python’s requests library in #newlanguage2019 etc

Just like a fancy new javascript framework that get propped up by big companies. Can't have experienced developers if the framework is brand new!

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