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Teenage programmers can understand legacy code. These ones didn't. Don't dis teen coders.
The issue isn't inherently age it's just time and experience, understanding different coding patterns and paradigms that have changed over the years etc. Even someone who's been coding every day from ages 14-20 can't have the same knowledge and experience as someone who's been working with software since the 90s or earlier. Granted, there will always be brilliant people who even when lacking experience are more talented and skillful than maybe the majority, but that is uncommon. I'm only in my late 20s. And I remember in college there was a huge diversity of skills, from "are you sure this career path is really a good idea for you?" To "holy hell how did you do all of that in one hackathon?" But even for those really smart folks, they aren't just going to inherently understand all the different ways to organize and structure code, all the conventions that exist, and more importantly why those methods and structures exist and the history that informed them. I'm not saying you need on the ground experience (although, I'd say many people do, as many people can't really internalize things without direct exposure), but there's just not enough time, literally, in the handful of years that is childhood and teenage years to absorb all that history.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that, yes, I agree that the problem isn't inherently about being teenagers but I do think it's a valid criticism that it's kind of ridiculous to have such young folks leading this kind of project given it's literally impossible for them to have the same amount of experience as software vets. It's also valid that young people are capable of seeing things in very new ways, since they aren't weighed down by al that history. But that's why diversity is useful especially for such a monumental project as this.
I don't know how many teenage programmers you have interacted with recently, but they are generally just learning the basics, learning core concepts, experimenting, etc...
There is a huge gap between making small, sometimes very cool and creative even, projects and understanding a giant legacy codebase in a language that is not taught anymore. I mean, even university grads often have trouble learning legacy code, much less in COBOL.
You wouldn't say your average teenage cook could make a gourmet meal for a house of 50 people 😅 not a dis, just they haven't had the time to get to greybeard level yet
I would imagine these teens didn't learn through the conventional educational channels.
How many teens you think can actually read and understand legacy languages like FORTRAN and COBOL? Let alone a complex codebase written in them?
I studied COBOL a bit in college and it's not exactly hard to read short snippets if you understand other languages, but good luck wrapping your head around anything remotely complex and actually understand what it is doing without having someone who understands the language. Hell, 15-20 years on and multiple languages later, my eyes still cross trying to read and grok COBOL. The people supporting those old code bases get paid well for a reason ...
I'm familiar with a dozen or so teenage romhackers. Assembly is surely harder to get the big picture of than cobol, but they're making incredible changes to 30-yo video games.
Learning to COBOL is not itself that hard.
Understanding decades of "business" logic is.
It isn't WHAT it is doing, it's WHY it is doing it that makes these systems labyrinthian.
Also afaik they don't get paid that well which is part of the problem.
I think it makes sense that people who don't have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won't be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for "data unknown".
This is not a problem specific of teenage programmers - it is natural for just about everybody to not really know the ins and outs of a language and best practices when programming with it, when they just learned it and haven't actually been using it in projects for a year or two at least.
What's specific to teenagers (and young coders in general) is that:
- They're very unlikely to have programmed with COBOL for a year or two, mainly because people when they start tend to gravitate towards "cool" stuff, which COBOL hasn't been for 4 decades.
- They haven't been doing software engineering for long enough to have realized the stuff I just explained above - in their near-peak Dunning-Krugger expertise in the software engineering field, they really do think that learning to program in a given language is the same as having figured out how to properly use it.
I think it makes sense that people who don’t have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won’t be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for “data unknown”.
The whole "COBOL's default date is 1875" thing is just a lie. COBOL doesn't even have a date type.
So the problem doesn't have anything to do with COBOL, someone just made it up
The way I'm reading is that they were holding a date related value in an unsigned integer field, so the start date (corresponding to 0) was a convention (whether internal or broader than that, I don't know) and they chose 0, the default initialization value for such fields as a flag for "no information". Back in the day there wasn't all that memory and storage to go around so I bet this was a 1 byte field holding a year value.
Those choices in a system to be used for Social Security for a whole nation make sense in software design terms if you're having to come up with your own solution for storing dates in as fewer bytes as possible in a language with no built-in date type, but present day teenagers would have never have been in such a situation because there are no currently fashionable programming languages without date types, space isn't as constrained anymore and they don't have experience in the kind of projects were one has to store records for hundreds of millions of people.
my brother taught me to code when i was 6, so at 19 i had 13 years of experience already. At 6 i was mostly doing simple stuff like qbasic, vb6, but still it adds up. I'm not saying I'm a great coder, not by a long shot, just that I was experienced as a teenager. I assume a lot of these teenagers are much better than i was.
I taught myself coding at 14 on a ZX Spectrum 128 and was doing Assembly within 2 years.
By now I have over 3 decades professional software engineering experience, almost 4 decades in total if including the stuff I did non-professionally.
Looking back, I knew how to make programs (even made a Minesweeper for the Spectrum in Assembly) but that's not at all the same as knowing the good or industry standard practices in the languages I used.
Whilst it should be way easier now to find those things out (there was no Internet back when I started), in my experience one needs to actually have been coding in a spaghetti way long enough and in enough projects you can't just ditch if they get too messy to actually feel the need to learn those better ways and hence go search for it.
Also I bet that it's a lot harder to find advanced tutorials on COBOL on the net from people with actual experience doing it professionally for a couple of years than it is for, say, Python.
I've been surprised multiple times by coworkers who don't know the significance of midnight January 1st 1970... We support an embedded Linux device, among other things...