Oct 15, 2026, 9:52 PM@me 95% of new programmers would benefit from knowing how to do control-break processing. I clean up after so many youngsters doing ad hoc processing for data we have known how to process efficiently since 1968.
Honestly I much prefer Java to COBOL and the recent enhancements to add more modern language features to Java version 255 are much appreciated. However: Programmer convenience is not the purpose of software engineering. Solving business problems is.
Oct 15, 2026, 10:05 PM@badtux I think that programmers could also benefit from learning assembly. That doesn't mean I'm going to use it as my day-to-day language. A good software engineer knows that everything is a trade-off, and it's about picking the tool that best solves the problem at hand.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that the industry is overrun with inexperienced devs who build a ton of slop (even before so-called AI hit the scene) because the companies they work for want to make line go up above all else. That's a capitalism problem more than an engineering problem though.