The Five Stages of Debugging a COBOL Application
Description
A five-panel comic strip illustrating the five stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) as experienced by a software developer. The developer first tries recompiling repeatedly ('HMM, THIS HAS TO BE RIGHT. MAYBE IF I COMPILE IT A FEW DOZEN MORE TIMES...'), then gets violently angry at the computer ('DIE, NON-SENTIENT TURDWAFFLE!'), tries to bargain with the inanimate machine ('IF I PROMISE TO DEFRAGMENT YOU EVERY DAY, WILL YOU WORK JUST THIS ONCE? PLEASE?'), despairs ('*SOB*'), and finally comes to the resigned conclusion that the problem was choosing to use the COBOL programming language ('Y'KNOW, MAYBE I SHOULDN'T HAVE USED COBOL....'). This meme captures the emotional rollercoaster of debugging, especially when working with legacy systems. For senior developers, it's a relatable take on the pain of maintaining old, difficult codebases and the dawning realization that a poor architectural or language choice from the past is the source of present-day suffering
Comments
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They say the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For a legacy COBOL dev, it's denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally accepting that the system will outlive you and you are merely its caretaker
Stage six of debugging grief: convincing the CFO that the 12-million-line COBOL monolith is not a “fully depreciated asset,” it’s a high-interest loan from 1974
The real sixth stage of legacy code grief is 'Promotion' - when you become senior enough that maintaining that COBOL system becomes someone else's problem, but you still wake up at 3am remembering that one PERFORM VARYING loop that never quite worked right
The five stages of debugging perfectly mirror the Kübler-Ross grief model because, let's face it, watching your code fail IS a form of loss - specifically, the loss of your sanity, your weekend, and your naive belief that 'it worked on my machine' would be sufficient. The progression from denial ('just one more compile!') to acceptance ('maybe COBOL wasn't the answer') is a rite of passage every senior engineer has experienced, usually around 3 AM when you realize the bug was a single misplaced semicolon... or that your architectural decision from six months ago has finally come home to roost
Turd Waffle: the dependency that turns 'proven in production' into 'proven to cause production issues'
The real sixth stage is “strangler-fig adapter,” where you ship a JSON gateway that spawns JCL to a VSAM-backed COBOL job - and then you own it for the next 12 years
After the tenth recompile and one nostalgic defrag, Acceptance hits: it’s not a bug, it’s COBOL - and the only unit test is tomorrow’s bank statement
Ehmm, ough, yeah, I missed dot here! Success! Comment deleted
y'know, maybe I shouldn't have started coding... Comment deleted