lime!

god i wish. family obligations.

SpaceBalls^© The Action Figure^TM!

yeah but nobody in scotland would call bourbon whisky

with the rise of LSP, i feel that ides have become less necessary. get an editor that you like, add an LSP client if there’s not one built-in, then install the server for your language.

bourbon and water? eh

fun fact: IBM asked for, and got, an exception from that clause.

i am currently working for a company that employs over 200 000 people. this is not a rare market.

he didn’t have legs, Kola!

if you’re looking at web stuff, sure. that market is saturated. i’ve worked in mining, manufacturing and vehicle industries and they’re always looking for people.

the market is screaming for talented developers. get in there!

i mean, yes it definitely is positive about eugenics, but looking at mike judge’s other works i’m not sure it was… on purpose? like, the guy has a super diverse set of creations with social commentary as a through-line, usually mocking authority and conservative views. king of the hill, office space, beavis and butthead, extract… he swings wide.

you’re not going to get a position remote if your client is a bank or some other entity that does cobol. that shit is running on an airgapped machine running a vm of a machine from the 90s running a vm of a machine from the 70s. if you’re really unlucky the source will be on punch cards because they didn’t invest in a machine with storage and asked the VM developers for the same workflow as before

Why is verbosity such a bad thing?

oh the names aren’t long. cobol has keyword alternatives for all operators and all numbers up to 20. since the language was designed for non-programmers, code in the wild follows no paradigm and mixes these alternatives freely. names are usually kept as short as possible.

there’s also a lot of boilerplate required for each file wrt the actual structure of the sections, assembly style. sure most of this can be automated with tooling but there’s no tooling available. the cobol people have mainly worked in their own sphere and not been included in the tooling explosion of the last 15 years.

here’s an example of some well-written cobol. most of it is nowhere close to this consistent, or source-controlled for that matter.

keyword count is a quick but bad metric of language complexity. thanks to all the alternative syntaxes cobol allows, it has around 300 keywords.

it doesn’t debunk, it raises additional questions. if you’re all in, “it’s a miracle” is a good enough explanation.

for what?

a fool, until someone believes you.

i was thinking about this the other day. i know the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is disputed but i think there must be something to linguistic relativism. like, in english words describing wealth are all tied to “worthiness”, and we talk about being wealthy as being more good.

in my language words describing wealth are all tied to effort: the ability and/or will to do something is “förmåga”, and if someone is wealthy they are “förmögen”, which i’m not entirely sure of the conjugation for but intuitively i read it as “has expended effort”. this is a more neutral term, and our class divide has historically been much shallower than the anglophone world. of course this is mostly due to different social systems but… why were they put in place ho begin with?

good cobol programmers are probably the highest paid programmers there are. mostly because there are so few of them and the systems are so critical.

but like… it’s not going to be fun. cobol as a language is extremely verbose, and you’re not going to actually develop anything. it’s just fixing compatibility problems and y2k issues all day.

this is stock value, and he gained the ~200B since the 6th of November.

Fortran is everywhere. it got a new release less than ten years ago.