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RE: Imagine opening your bank account for your stimulus check and seeing this instead...
In our bank, they still use DOS and Novell NetWare... When ATMs crash, one can see DOS Prompt but without a keyboard, it is impossible to see anything else or play with it.
It only takes one wrong key press and shitload of money can be transferred to wrong account.
Few years ago I was tempted to test what happens if I put negative number to field for amount to send, if the system would accept or reject it... One could also test with very large number, if it would cause overflow or wraparound.
Most of the big computer stuff is written in COBOL, and has never been upgraded to a modern language.
So, if you know COBOL you can still get work at the big banks.... and no where else.
I did never learn COBOL... I started with Z80 assembly and Basic, then moved to Turbo Pascal and after that TCL, Perl, Visual Basic and C/C++... I can also do some editing in Python, but I haven't really used it for long yet...
And hopefully, you will never have to.
For me, it is just the language de jour.
C was great when you needed the ability to access hardware code and stuff, but its too detailed for when you are dealing with megabytes of code.
And so, now we have Python, and ruby on rails, and
soon we will have another language that is more suited to the paradigm in the future.
Its all the same, just different ways to organize things.
Its all still comes down to decrement R1 and jump if zero.
I'm a full-time developer so I deal with gigabytes of code... Before I bought my current PC, it took two days to compile a single application... Now it takes just 4 hours to build all.
My current PC has 32 GB of RAM memory and 1 TB of flash memory on motherboard. It has extension board with another processor and 4 GB RAM for it.