I'd rather do COBOL than ".Not"
well, I'd MUCH rather do COBOL than ".Not" coding, that's for sure.
having to do BOTH - maybe they should hire a starving contractor in a 3rd world country... someone willing to actually SUFFER that much.
or they could hire ME, I'd hold my nose and get it done in a very short time, but for a unbelievably high price - my soul (and sanity) is worth a LOT these days...
[we've all had that "clean up this @#$% code" contract, haven't we?]
my worst case example of this was from my predecessor at a major computer hardware company, in the M.I.S. department. There was a COBOL to FORTRAN 'hook' needed by the ASK/MANMAN system (written in FORTRAN) to get sales tax from the VERTEX (written in COBOL) system, that had quarterly tape updates and everything [it was the 90's on a minicomputer]. The hook's source was lost. When I made some requested changes to the COBOL, an old bug re-surfaced. Seems that the FORTRAN side of the hook was having values passed by REFERENCE, and the DOOFUS programmer MODIFIED THEM before passing to the COBOL code (add 1 or something). What he SHOULD have done is made copies. His 'fix' was probably to subtract 1 again, or whatever. My fix was make copies into different variables, modify THOSE, pass THOSE to the COBOL program. And that programmer's name is permanently burnt into my 'never work with THAT guy unless I'm 1 day from absolute financial ruin' list.