The new M1-powered MacBook Air is hilariously fast, and the battery lasts a long-ass time.
If you stop reading this review immediately after this, then know that unless Windows virtualization is a requirement of your workflow, you should probably just go ahead and sell your old MacBook Air immediately and get this thing instead.
The excitement around Apple’s new M1 chip is everywhere. I bought a MacBook Air 16GB M1 to see how viable it is as main development machine - here’s an early report after a week of testing.
In fact, these days, when the phone rings in the house Thomas retired to — in a small town outside of Toronto — it will occasionally be someone from the bank. Hey, they’ll say, can you, uh, help… update your code? Maybe add some new features to it? Because, as it turns out, the bank no longer employs anyone who understands COBOL as well as Thomas does, who can dive in and tweak it to perform a new task. Nearly all the COBOL veterans, the punch-card jockeys who built the bank’s crucial systems way back when, who know COBOL inside and out — they’ve retired. They’ve left the building, just like Thomas. And few young coders have any interest in learning a dusty, 50-year-old computer language. They’re much more excited by buzzier new fields, like Toronto’s booming artificial-intelligence scene. They’re learning fresh new coding languages.
So this large bank is still dependent on people like, Thomas, who is 73, to not only keep things running, but add new features and improvements.
Will his COBOL outlive him?
I went out for a short walk today, to exercise my legs outdoors, down a few blocks to a supermarket that is much further than the usual one that I go to. I bought some eggs and some milk, and I've also bought a sandwich on the way back.
Both purchases were made using Apple Pay.
which made me wonder: how much COBOL code did my money touched today, moving from my bank account to the bank accounts of the supermarket and the sandwich store?
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Thanks for reading.