After more than 3 years of cobol development i wrote my first C# forms program which works like a charm so i thought, "yeah i should rewrite/port it to mobile using Xamarin, how hard could that be?"

I open a xamarin project and after an hour of trying to figure how the fuck this shit works i realize that it's going to very fucking hard since I can't even figure out how to fucking add a button!

A bug has been plaguing me for almost 3 weeks.
Today, I finally found the fucker!
Feels so good!

Also, had i just been granted access to the fucking error logs I would have found it in 15 min to start with....

Making REST APIs for Cobol!
Json to fixed block data structures are a bit tricky...

Have you ever worked with DL/1 databases? They are fucking horrible!

God i miss SQL...

Just pushed 6 months of work into prod! Please don't abend...

Also, mainframes... what could possibly go wrong?

Dear IBM manual,
Fuck you!
Sincerly....

IBMs manuals are mostly very informative.. IF YOU CAN FIND WHAT THE FUCK YOU ARE LOOKING FOR!

They hide everything and refere you to 15 other manuals and ultimatly you will end up in some fucking assembler manual describing what you are after... but in the "wrong" language...
Sigh.. need to learn Assembler...

Today... i physically touched a mainframe...!

Dream come true for a cobol developer :D

Been ripping the hairs from my skull the entire week trying design some new databases and some SQL to pull the correct data from them.

Litterally 5 minutes before i log out for the weekend I run my test cases and everything works! Amazing start on the weekend :D

Ask a cobol developer anything!

Many people have heard about cobol and the attached "omg why would you want to work with that!?" But most have no clue what it's like so...

Ask away!

Fuck you IBM IMS!
Efficient as fuck but extremly unforgiving if you want to do something it wasnt truly ment for...

Don't write code after your own preferences. Write code that others will understand straight away.

Im a cobol developer and the programs me and my colleagues write have a life expectancy of 30+ years. The time people will spend reading my code will be far greater than the time it took me to design, code and test the program...

Also, dinosaurs!

Anyone tried to write rexx programs? You cannot debug the fucking thing! Only run traces on it :(

How do you guys perform program tests or build your test env? Like redirect writing sqls towords private tables whilst keeping reading sqls towords to general test tables

Worst part of being a cobol developer working on mainframes? You cannot google a single fucking thing!
The ones who could answer the question you googled have either died or have the proper answer on an actual piece of paper in a file capinet somewhere...

It's scary that mainframes run like 80% of the worlds finance systems and the people who actually knows how they operate will all retire within 5-10 years :p

Who the fuck writes 2k lines of code without a single fucking comment!?

Going to hold a live demo today in front of 80+ people... wish me luck!

Pushed my first program into production today! Lets just hope it doesnt crash the mainframe xD

Has anyone here seen a mainframe error dump? It's an 8000 line wall of text with maby 7995 lines of fucking jibberish hiding the cryptic fucking error message...

Why the fuck can't they just put the interesting shit at the top of the file insted of hiding it in nonsense!?

New dev here.
Got assigned a task which revolves around trying to figure out a 7000 character DB2 SQL (spaces not included).

Im dying a litle bit inside...

Be me.
Be 25.
Be working as a cobol dev.
Having dinosaure co-workers who write the same frankencode they wrote 30 years ago.
Be trying to figure out wtf they have writen.
Be mad...

Can anyone relate?

Ps. They know how to write a program that works (because they copied 90% without understanding what it does) and they can do it fast.
They just suck at making it easy to understand wtf is going on.

Don't know JCL but need to compile, link, bind and execute a cobol program.
JCL template contains syntax errors here and there.

...fuck