Cobol Memes

The classic "wanna see spaghetti?" pickup line, but make it programming! Nothing says "I'm a coding disaster" quite like offering to show someone your assembler, BASIC, old C code, or COBOL. It's the digital equivalent of opening your closet and having all the skeletons fall out at once. The real horror isn't in haunted houses—it's in legacy codebases written by developers who left the company 15 years ago with zero documentation.

This meme is basically the programming language version of a high school yearbook's "Most Likely To..." section, except it's brutally honest. Rust gets labeled "The fan favorite" because its zealous community will literally evangelize Rust at your grandmother's funeral if given the chance. Java as "Made to be hated" is just *chef's kiss* - a verbose language that forces you to create seventeen factory classes just to print "Hello World". Python as "The hot one" is spot on. Everyone wants to date Python these days, especially those AI folks who can't stop sliding into its DMs. C being "The only normal person" is that one friend who's been reliably showing up since the 70s without drama. Visual Studio (C#/.NET) gets "Uhh...what's your name again?" because Microsoft rebrands it every 37 minutes. PHP as "The gremlin" is perfect - it powers half the internet but everyone pretends they don't use it, like that weird cousin nobody mentions at family gatherings. C++ with "Mmm...society" is that pretentious intellectual who thinks they're too complex for mere mortals to understand. JavaScript being "Just straight up evil" is the universal truth that binds all developers together, like complaining about meetings. And COBOL getting "No screen time. All the plot relevance" is that ancient banking system quietly holding the entire financial world together while Gen Z developers argue about which new framework is cooler.

Just like vampires fear sunshine and Superman fears kryptonite, modern developers run screaming from COBOL code. That ancient green screen with its uppercase commands might as well be garlic to a vampire. The joke's on us though—those legacy COBOL systems still run 95% of ATM transactions and most airline booking systems. Nothing strikes fear in the heart of a 20-something React developer quite like being told "we need you to maintain this 60-year-old mainframe code." Career kryptonite indeed.

The joke here is a brilliant double entendre about inheritance. The first person mentions inheriting a COBOL codebase last touched by someone's mom in the 90s (literal inheritance), while the reply points out that's not how programming inheritance works (you know, the OOP concept where Child extends Parent, not where your actual parent leaves you legacy code). Nothing says "congratulations on your new job" quite like being handed 30-year-old COBOL that nobody understands anymore. The real inheritance tax is the mental breakdown you'll have trying to figure out why everything is in ALL CAPS and what PERFORM VARYING actually does.

Ah, the legendary GitHub pull request to rewrite Twitter in COBOL! For the uninitiated, COBOL is a programming language from the 1950s that's still running critical banking systems and government infrastructure, but about as suited for modern social media as a steam engine is for space travel. The satirical PR suggestion is pure comedy gold—imagine handling Twitter's real-time feeds and media processing with a language designed when computers took up entire rooms and "memory" meant physical punch cards! The 17 thumbs-up reactions show there are plenty of developers with a sense of humor (or masochistic tendencies). Meanwhile, somewhere a mainframe administrator is breaking into a cold sweat thinking about the 400-column code needed just to display a single tweet.

Ah, the classic "let's rewrite decades of legacy code in a few months" fantasy! Some tech bro wants to speedrun refactoring millions of lines of COBOL that literally keeps grandma's checks flowing. Because nothing says "responsible software engineering" like treating Social Security's codebase like it's a weekend hackathon project. What could possibly go wrong? Just sprinkle some AI, blockchain, and "agile methodology" on that 60-year-old code and boom – fixed by Tuesday! Next up: rebuilding the entire Pentagon with Legos over a long weekend.

This is a masterclass in legacy systems biting back! The tweet explains how Social Security runs on COBOL (a programming language from the 1950s) where dates are stored using the ISO 8601 standard with an epoch starting 150 years ago (1875). So when a date is unknown, it defaults to zero, which COBOL interprets as 1875. The humor comes from Donald Trump Jr. misinterpreting Elon Musk's comment about this technical quirk as evidence of "150-year-old people collecting Social Security" – when it's actually just a database returning default epoch values! It's the perfect intersection of ancient programming languages, government systems that never get updated, and non-technical people drawing wild conclusions. Mainframe programmers are cackling while pouring another cup of coffee right now.