3 ms·

Fuck it, I am sick of the churn associated with modern development. Cobol sounds quite appealing right now.

by collyw 9y ago

kayla210 9y ago
There's no churn, it's great. And there's plenty to learn once you get in, depending on where you go. COBOL requires knowing a good bit about the business itself, so it's hard to get bored with it. At least, I haven't yet and I've been at it for a whopping 2 years.
adrianN 9y ago
You could also become an embedded dev. Write software for cars or planes, or train, or nuclear power plants. If you want you can work on the same piece of software using the same tooling for your whole career.
- collyw 9y ago
  Whats the language of choice for that? C or would Rust be worth learning? Any pointers for how to get started in that field?
  - murph-almighty 9y ago
    (heh pointers) I was in ECE in college (graduated in 2017) but do full stack software engineering for a bank now. AFAIK it's still C, but I wouldn't be surprised if Rust picked up due to the emphasis on memory safety- dynamic memory allocation and recursion are usually avoided in embedded. Some of the lessons I got from embedded have carried over to my place of work- I found a repo that used floating point for money and immediately knew why that was a bad idea, because my embedded systems professor had spent an almost an entire lesson explaining why you don't use floating point for money or time. side note: Said professor (Phil Koopman) was an expert witness in the Toyota unexpected acceleration lawsuit, he has a talk on it that can be found at https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toyota-unintended.html https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toy....
  - adrianN 9y ago
    It's C using compilers from the early 90s. Some shops use C++, again with ancient compilers. There are also some Ada positions.
  - snowwindwaves 9y ago
    It isn't about the language but about the physics process you are controlling. To write software to fly a plane you need to understand how the plane works, same for power plants, saw mills, assembly lines, refineries, pipelines, etc. Choose the process you want to control and then go work at a place that has that process or a consultant that supplies equipment or services to the owner/operator of the plant. Then you will learn how the process operates and how the software controlling it works, and how it could be improved.
bigato 9y ago
I feel the same and started working on an mainframe assembly codebase a couple of months ago. I'm very happy.

Fuck it, I am sick of the churn associated with modern development. Cobol sounds quite appealing right now.

by collyw 9y ago

Fuck it, I am sick of the churn associated with modern development. Cobol sounds quite appealing right now.

There's no churn, it's great. And there's plenty to learn once you get in, depending on where you go. COBOL requires knowing a good bit about the business itself, so it's hard to get bored with it. At least, I haven't yet and I've been at it for a whopping 2 years.

adrianN 9y ago

You could also become an embedded dev. Write software for cars or planes, or train, or nuclear power plants. If you want you can work on the same piece of software using the same tooling for your whole career.

collyw 9y ago
Whats the language of choice for that? C or would Rust be worth learning? Any pointers for how to get started in that field?
- murph-almighty 9y ago
  (heh pointers) I was in ECE in college (graduated in 2017) but do full stack software engineering for a bank now. AFAIK it's still C, but I wouldn't be surprised if Rust picked up due to the emphasis on memory safety- dynamic memory allocation and recursion are usually avoided in embedded. Some of the lessons I got from embedded have carried over to my place of work- I found a repo that used floating point for money and immediately knew why that was a bad idea, because my embedded systems professor had spent an almost an entire lesson explaining why you don't use floating point for money or time. side note: Said professor (Phil Koopman) was an expert witness in the Toyota unexpected acceleration lawsuit, he has a talk on it that can be found at https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toyota-unintended.html https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toy....
- adrianN 9y ago
  It's C using compilers from the early 90s. Some shops use C++, again with ancient compilers. There are also some Ada positions.
- snowwindwaves 9y ago
  It isn't about the language but about the physics process you are controlling. To write software to fly a plane you need to understand how the plane works, same for power plants, saw mills, assembly lines, refineries, pipelines, etc. Choose the process you want to control and then go work at a place that has that process or a consultant that supplies equipment or services to the owner/operator of the plant. Then you will learn how the process operates and how the software controlling it works, and how it could be improved.

bigato 9y ago

I feel the same and started working on an mainframe assembly codebase a couple of months ago. I'm very happy.