in the year 2049...

[sergebroom]

Do they still teach kids about mainframes and COBOL programming? Or is that skill set kept alive by those of my generation who haven't moved on to the new! exciting! unstable! world of unix machines and their databases? I can see the newspaper headlines of 2049 telling us that the last mainframe programmer has passed away and there's nobody left to deal with the year-2050 bug.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I wonder if they'll still be using BASIC.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Probably not. I feel archaic.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

They might not be using HTML either, come to think of it.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

To think I was so proud of having taught myself HTML a couple of years ago... Now I feel definitely antediluvian.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Change comes too quickly. That's one sign we're getting older.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

"Ain't it the truth?" as the Lion said in The Wizard of Oz.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Sadly so.

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

Back in 1993 I was taking some Novell Netware classes, and one of my fellow students was a C+ (the language) programmer. I'd been working in RPG II for 9 years. She might as well have been speaking in ancient Greek for all I could understand.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I guess the trick is to keep being able to learn. It's not always easy and sometimes one hits the proverbial brickwall. Java was it, for me, with its "multidimensional" approach to programming. I do better with more linear things. I guess that's a failing of mine, but it still leaves a lot of things I can handle.