> Most roles let you settle into one way of thinking. Engineers think in systems and constraints. Designers think in experiences and affordances. Salespeople think in objections and value props...
I don't think often, but when I do, it's in stereotypes. Stay dismissive my friends.
The COBOL thing seems to be working out just fine last I heard. Today a small number of people get paid well to know COBOL's depths and legacy platforms/software. The world moved on, where possible, to lower cost labor and tools.
Arguably, that outcome was the right creative destruction. Market economics doesn't long-term incentivize any other outcomes. We'll see the arc of COBOL play out again with LLM coding.
I've been waiting for the article talking about how AI is affecting COBOL. Preferably with quotes from actual COBOL programmers since I can already theorize as well as the next guy but I'm interested in the reports from the field.
While LLMs have become pretty good at generating code, I think some of their other capabilities are still undersold and poorly understood, and one of them is that they are very good at porting. AI may offer the way out for porting COBOL finally.
You definitely can't just blindly point it at one code base and tell it to convert to another. The LLMs do "blur" the code, I find, just sort of deciding that maybe this little clause wasn't important and dropping it. (Though in some cases I've encountered this, I sometimes understand where it is coming from, when the old code was twisty and full of indirection I often as a human have a hard time being sure what is and is not used just by reading the code too...) But the process is still way, way faster than the old days of typing the new code in one line at a time by staring at the old code. It's definitely way cheaper to port a code base into a new language in 2026 than it was in 2020. In 2020 it was so expensive it was almost always not even an option. I think a lot of people have not caught up with the cost reductions in such porting actions now, and are not correctly calculating that into their costs.
It is easier than ever to get out of a language that has some fundamental issue that is hard to overcome (performance, general lack of capability like COBOL) and into something more modern that doesn't have that flaw.
> We estimate that these laws prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year and have decreased the total by 145,000 since 1980.
> We are often faced with 45-button remote controls, and multi-level menus of options to navigate. This can be ok in everyday life, but when you transport to the spiritual dimension of the Grateful Dead show, or when you are tripping, menus and buttons are the last thing you can deal with.
> The Time Machine needs to be controlled with knobs, a few buttons, and intuition. And if it doesn’t do exactly what you want, maybe it will do something that you need anyway.
Any significant transfer to the ordinary people will flow, in large part, to the government.
Putting cash into a somewhat closed system is particularly inflationary.
So, this well-meaning humanitarian idea of cash transfer (a) funds an authoritarian regime while (b) adding inflation woes to the people it's trying to help.
Proper grammar on formulaic language is a proof-of-work system. Difficult to achieve but easy to check. It suggests that the author cared enough to put in the time. When the cost of graduate labor is low, careful editing suggests that you can burn a student's time to demonstrate the message is worth reading.
I don't think often, but when I do, it's in stereotypes. Stay dismissive my friends.
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