COBOL quote in the news

[Ray Arachelian]

madodel wrote:
>
> Just prior to y2k they were paying large bonuses to get C programmers 
> to learn COBOL so the 100s of millions of lines of code could be 
> checked and patched.  Large companies were desperate.  I'm sure a lot 
> of these folks were canned after 2000 when all the Y2K nonsense 
> finally ended but I'm sure they aren't all retired. 

Sounds like what they really needed were rewrites, or perhaps 
(automated) language translators; say from Cobol to Java.  (I say Java 
because the mindset of most corps out there is to hire the junior guys 
since they see programmers as cogs and would want a cheap source of 
labor, and since Java seems to be the Visual Basic of today, not so much 
in language complexity but rather in terms of the pool of available kids 
fresh out of college - as sad as that concept is... sigh...)

Of course there'd be a lot of manual labor involved in bringing things 
up to standards as computer translated code is usually fuglier than the 
original.