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When you're fresh out of bootcamp learning React and TypeScript, then someone casually mentions COBOL and you're like "what's that?" only to watch senior devs collectively lose their minds. For context: COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) was created in 1959 and is still running critical banking systems, insurance companies, and government infrastructure worldwide. We're talking billions of transactions daily on code older than your parents. The problem? Nobody wants to learn it, everyone who knows it is retiring, and banks are desperately clinging to these systems because rewriting them would be like performing open-heart surgery on a patient running a marathon. New programmers see it as ancient history that should be extinct. Banks see it as the immovable foundation of global finance that cannot be destroyed without triggering financial apocalypse. The cognitive dissonance is *chef's kiss*. Fun fact: There are an estimated 220 billion lines of COBOL still in production today. That's roughly 43% of all banking systems. Sleep tight! 💀

The hard truth that keeps memory-conscious developers up at night. A boolean only needs 1 bit to represent true or false, but because most systems can't address individual bits, it gets allocated a whole byte. That's 87.5% storage efficiency loss, which is basically the computing equivalent of buying a mansion to store a single shoe. Some languages try to optimize this with bit fields or packed structures, but let's be real—most of the time we're just casually wasting 7 bits per boolean like we're made of RAM. Which, to be fair, we kind of are these days. Storage is cheap, existential dread about inefficiency is free. The real tragedy? Those 7 bits could've been living their best life storing actual data, but instead they're just... there. Unemployed. Collecting dust. A monument to the gap between theoretical computer science and practical implementation.

That moment when your code compiles on the first try and you just sit there in disbelief, questioning everything you know about the universe. Like Thanos seeing something that defies all logic, you're convinced there's a hidden bug lurking somewhere. No warnings, no errors, just pure success? Yeah right. You'll spend the next 30 minutes running it over and over, checking logs, adding debug statements, because deep down you know the compiler is just messing with you. First-try compilation success is basically a myth, like unicorns or developers who actually read documentation.

When someone tells you to "just read the docs," they're assuming documentation is like a nice tutorial with step-by-step instructions. Reality check: documentation is written by engineers who've already mastered the thing and assume you know what a "monad" is without explanation. The LEGO analogy nails it. You want to attach a simple 1x4 brick to your project. The documentation? It's showing you how that brick can theoretically connect to seventeen different surfaces at impossible angles, none of which are the straightforward "just put it on top" approach you actually need. Bonus points when the docs explain every edge case except the one basic use case that 99% of users need. Thanks, I really needed to know about the deprecated parameter from version 2.3 before learning how to initialize the library.