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US CIO/CTO: Idea of Hiring COBOL Coders Laughable

Posted by Soulskill on from the lords-of-cobol-hear-my-prayers dept.

theodp writes "If you're a COBOL programmer, you're apparently persona non grata in the eyes of the nation's Chief Information and Chief Technology Officers. Discussing new government technology initiatives at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel quipped, 'I'm recruiting COBOL developers, any out there?,' sending Federal CTO Todd Park into fits of laughter (video). Lest anyone think he was serious about hiring the old fogies, VanRoekel added: 'Trust me, we still have it in the Federal government, which is quite, quite scary.' So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators — the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.' Within 24 hours of VanRoekel's and Park's announcement, 600 people had applied to be Presidential Innovation Fellows."

9 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. a**? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You mean ass. No need for silly regular expressions.

    1. Re:a**? by isopropanol · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, not ass, but nothing or any number of a's

    2. Re:a**? by toriver · · Score: 4, Funny

      Or maybe a double pointer of (cryptic) type a? These programming languages are weird.

    3. Re:a**? by smellotron · · Score: 4, Funny

      Or maybe a double pointer of (cryptic) type a?

      No, it's clearly an extension of the postfix increment operator. The expression a** returns the current value of a and as a side effect executes a *= 1. Because it requires a copy, in most cases you should use **a instead.

    4. Re:a**? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 3, Funny

      Semantically correct answer:

          Ah, dynamic memory allocation and referencing. How very... academic. COBOL of course has facilities for such things, but why would you ever want to use
          them?

      Syntactically correct answer:

          BPTR USAGE IS POINTER.
          APTR USAGE IS POINTER.
          SET APTR TO ADDRESS OF BPTR. ...and then the global economy crashes...

      Ah, that's what happened at Lehman Brothers. :-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  2. Bad dudes by Ironchew · · Score: 3, Funny

    Are you a bad enough dude to innovate the President?

  3. Re:Pfffffttttttttt by Johann+Lau · · Score: 4, Funny

    "to design, create, and kick a** for America"

    As George Carlin knew, that's actually code for bending over and taking the whole thing without lube, then mumbling "thank you" while whipping out your wallet.

  4. Re:Pfffffttttttttt by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Funny

    Am I the only one who thought "Idiocracy" when watching that?

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  5. Re:Pfffffttttttttt by kmoser · · Score: 3, Funny

    You don't want to know where Grace Hopper keeps her beard.