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I wanted to see what the COBOL job market looked like. So I learned the superficial basics of COBOL in a day or two, just so I wouldn’t be a complete fraud when I put it into my linkedin profile as a skill to see what happens.
How did that turn out for you?
Didn’t get a single reqeust, so this had less impact than expected. Thought there was more old rusty companies looking for a non-retired engineer.
Yeah I think that’s mostly a myth. When I looked up salaries they were definitely good (for programming; amazing for the average person), but not “I would write COBOL for that” good.
There aren’t really that many old COBOL systems around. I think it’s mostly just over-reported because you can write an article about how some government department still uses COBOL but you can’t write about one that switched to Java.
I learned bash instead of python because my 8 year old brain saw all the parentheses and thought “ew no”…
Experienced me sees a language where parentheses are optional and I think “ew no”
I wanted to make a scripted version of pinochle because my friends and I play it a bunch on tabletop sim and there was nothing available, so I learned LUA
I learned pinochle as a kid, but can’t remember how to play now.
I learned Lua as a programming student but can’t remember how to use it now.
Because it was the new hotness
Which js framework was it?
We should be able to figure this out. Which year, month, date and hour of the day was it?
I learned a bit of KOBOL after hearing it was the weirdest, hardest, and most unused programming language back in highschool. But only really enough to do a hello world and other very simplistic programs. More because finding resources at that time was difficult.
I tried to learn some back around 2019. I don’t remember why, but there was something going on relating to it at the time? Maybe it was as simple as me reading an article about Cobol devs retiring.
I inherited a C# code base that had a custom runtime loader for APL modules. Over half of the app was actually written in APL with C# just hosting the API… so yeah, had to learn that. I don’t recommend it but some people seem to really love the language. Those people are often statisticians, not programmers.
Maybe not dumb but I’ve definitely been forced to at least partly learn a few terrible languages so I could use some system:
- PHP so I could write custom linters for Phabricator. Pretty successful. PHP is a bad language but it’s fairly easy to read and write.
- Ruby so I could understand what the hell Gitlab is doing. Total failure here, Ruby is completely incomprehensible especially in a large codebase.
- OCaml so I can work on a super niche compiler written in OCaml. It’s a decent language except the syntax is pretty terrible, OPAM is super buggy, and I dunno if it’s this codebase or just OCaml people in general but there are approximately zero comments and identifiers are like
ityp,nsec,ef_bin… The sort of names where you already need to know what they are.
I learned lolcode in college because we had to write a sorting algorithm in assembly and “any other programming language.”
I learned a bit of FORTH because an old Minecraft mod (Redpower 2) had a computer that could run it.
I wonder how many people learned Lua for this reason (CC and friends).
I did! I picked it up specifically for CC, then I found a window manager that was also configured in Lua.
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No idea, if this was the case for you, but learning how the magic works can definitely make it less magical…
I became a Game Programmer. Job market sucks right now, so I’m cleaning toilets and taking out trash at a grocery store.
But hey, on my days off I sometimes have time to work on games.
I wanted to get into creating video games.
I ended up in software engineering for financial companies. It killed my hobby love of programming but the salary is worth it. Exceptionally lucrative, and I have never struggled for work, with great pay, bonus, benefits, equity
Perl because a system I worked on was just a bunch of Perl scripts in a trench coat pretending to be a program.
I learned it because the ancient beast kept breaking because it just a bunch of Perl scripts in a trench coat cobbled together over generations.
because a system I worked on was just a bunch of Perl scripts in a trench coat pretending to be a program.
Hmm… OpenBSD ports system and package manager?
Lol. Oh no I hope not, but a totally different system.
I learned Go because I really liked the keyword go
This feels like me wanting to learn Hare because I like rabbits, which I bring up because someone left this reply for me and I think it applies to you too:
That is such a sweet reason! Whimsical decisions like this can be some of the best. Life demands a bit of whimsy every now and then.
Yes I think it’s really beneficial to operate by vibes sometimes lol. Trust your instincts !
Learned Python to try and hack into a porn site.
I learned Python and regular expressions to download hundreds of pictures from 4chan. Good times.
Seems like a good way to get put on a ‘list’.
Ah, the good ol’ regex html parser.
Well, were you able to hack into the porn site? Python seems like an odd choice for hacking a website.
This was over 10 years ago, maybe 20. I wanted to pick up a new language and I seemed pretty driven, at the time, to hack a certain site. I think I gave up on it and as usual I enjoyed writing the code more than using the app.
It didn’t use webscraping or anything too sophisticated. I just applied a few dictionaries I found online and ran everything through a series of anonymous proxies. Very brute force.
Ha! I tried the same thing with some random sites like 20 years ago. I managed to get into a few of them and emailed the registered owner that they needed better security.
I almost did this for a different reason, people choose python because it has some pretty good web automation/scraping libraries to work with.
Might not be dumb, but I learned programming to create things and learn how things worked. Started with entering in hundreds of lines of BASIC printed in magazines, including debugging font typos.
Then learned MUF, or Multi-User Forth, a stack-based text language for creating text based dungeons, and managed to stop some malicious users spying and people’s privacy in the server.
Every so often, I pick up a new language to test it to see if it does cool stuff or help me further learn more about how things function.
I was forced to do it during my conscription service to implement an excel merge in VBA because that was the programming installed on the system. Fuck VBA and the integraded VBA Editor in Excel
Österreich oder? Hab ich damals auch bei einem HTL Praktikum gemacht.
Ja genau war während des GWDs befohlen worden VBA zu lernen um die ganzen Excel und Access Anwendungen zu erweitern, wo hast du VBA geschrieben?
