Someday people will be posting similar Javascript jabs on April 1 and laughing about how people could ever have had serious jobs working with such a ridiculous language.
In case people are confused - the Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy is a real bootcamp. They do not teach COBOL - that's the April Fool's joke.
This is interesting. I think 2020 is an achievable number.
I'm an accountant by profession, and since I program; I got thrown into a project at work where we had to reverse-engineer COBOL code to figure out what the banking system was doing. It was a painful exercise by today's standards as the code was badly written, but we pulled through.
There was a script of a few thousand lines, which calculated interest on most of the cheque and investment products. It had the "here be dragons" disclaimer. After defeating the dragons, I asked if I could add "dragon slayer was here", but that wasn't going to happen, so I made it my pinned tweet (@nevi_me).
I wonder if it would be worth my while to join the bootcamp and learn COBOL properly.
Given that I've heard day rates as high as £2000 for a CIVIL engineer, this would be great if it is a real thing. Alas, the timing of the post suggests otherwise...
I am actually having enormous trouble telling. They seem to link to real articles about their academy at real publications (such as https://www.forbes.com/sites/leoking/2016/01/30/shanna-grego...), plus, there is a LOT of material here for a joke site. But it sure sounds to me like satire.
Funny thing is, this is the Grace Hopper Program, so it would be totally appropriate for them to teach COBOL. After all, they're named after its inventor. (Okay, technically, it was a committee, but still, you don't get nicknamed the (grand)mother of COBOL just by sitting on a committee.)
Nevertheless, I don't think they're serious. Which kinda makes me wonder: there are way too many lines of COBOL out there to rewrite them all before the current COBOL programmers retire. And yet no one (give or take rounding error) is learning or teaching it these days. So what happens by the time COBOL turns 100? It's not much farther away than the Y2038 bug.
Do we really need someone to teach it? Presumably old books on COBOL still exist, or at least some sort of documentation. If there is a need/demand then reasonably talent programmers could probably pick it up. I haven't learned most of my (minimal) programming from courses but from books.
000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.
000300
000400 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000500 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000600 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000700 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800
000900 DATA DIVISION.
001000 FILE SECTION.
001100
101200 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
101300
101400 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
101500 DISPLAY "Hello world, I'm back!"
101600 STOP RUN.
If this ain't april fools joke lord have mercy on us.