Depends whether you get paid or not. See also:- 'Cobol'... and mainframe assembler.
Had a close friend I made fun of who, around 1980, went to a community college to learn COBOL cause he worked at a bank doing low paying work. Until he died maybe 10 years ago, he was still programming in COBOL for that same bank.
Sounds like "job security" to me.
Cobol probably paid him much better than 'Rust' would have done.
FTFY
Boeing?
In Lisping at JPL Ron Garret mentions a number of languages being used but this is 20+ years old.
For me, yes. 029 punchcards, and because not everyone had access to a punch, we had to hand pencil the dots for an optical reader...the highschool teacher was kind of dick. if those of us who had punch access were allowed to use them then there would not have been 15 minute wait lines at the reader from people constantly remarking their cards that were incorrectly read.
I remember a chap who did a phd on AI using lisp in my department, back in the late 80s. He was really fed up because no-one would give him a job anywhere as a lisp programmer. If you could fast-forward to today he would probably have multiple job offers doing AI work. Maybe he should have applied to JPL.
www.industryweek.com
The "old" AI (expert systems etc) used Lisp. The new AI (LLMs) seem to mostly use python (at low level), though you can interact with it in English. As for Lisp @ JPL, read Ron's article. It did not survive.
-- of course that advice may be already obsolete, what with vibe coding and all.That's some old stuff you're quoting here, like pre-pandemic (2019)!Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
Mark Rabin, a former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature.
Maybe not...
That is the onboard software. And yes, the management really screwed the pooch in the last decades. They are not the only ones, mind you. Some planes better get remodelled as something else before they remake themselves into a lawn ornament.Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
Mark Rabin, a former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature.
Maybe not...
IMHO, Common Lisp should be used to bootstrap a brand new company (like Orbitz) because most of your competitors will be grinding out code in less flexible languages while you can prototype things very quickly and stand up a working site in no time. And then sell it! Since you're not going to find CL programmers that easily, and that can be a problem for the acquiring company
That too! Prototype that runs too slow is of no use (one reason why scheme isn’t very popular).
Yeah, the whole thing is probably designed by some AI now and built by robots. Which leaves the only really indispensable people in the company left, namely the bean counters.
Heh; I'd be more surprised if RMS entertained AI, but that doesn't sound likely. I like those reasons
I have no reason to do any Fortran programming anymore, except that I have a copy of the Snoopy calendar program for IBM mainframe on my FreeBSD laptop. It worked for a while but recent versions of GCC Fortran and LLVM Fortran fail to understand such ancient code.
AI translation ain't gonna happen. I'm not a mainframe programmer, but I have friends who are, and knowing cobol the language itself is just a small fraction of what you need to know. I spoke to one guy recently and asked if AI translation of cobol to java for mainframe DP will work, he just laughed. The money is good, because the banks and other companies have many millions invested in the hardware, and the cost of migration to the cloud is prohibitive, so the game is to get the latest hardware refresh and keep the existing software running. He mentioned in some cases they don't even have source code left, or the source they have bears no relation to what is being run currently. Unfortunately it's a very steep and long learning curve, that you can only really get by doing the real work on the mainframe. Getting hold of GNU cobol and teaching yourself the language isn't going to prepare you sufficiently to do the real job. If if was that easy, the market would be flooded with people... sorry, I meant to say "offshore resource" (cough) working remotely at doing it.
