Disclosure: Starte career as a COBOL programmer for NCR in 1982. COBOL is a great language for its intended purpose. As it C, python, Lisp, .....name any lang

Disclosure: Starte career as a COBOL programmer for NCR in 1982. COBOL is a great language for its intended purpose. As it C, python, Lisp, .....name any language in top 50 on TIOBE index.... These days i think of it as a DSL for business transactions. To those people having a hard time getting a job the biggest hurdles are in the runtime environments. COBOL is so simple you can learn it in a weekend assuming you know programming basics and concepts well. However....runtimes are a different thing. What the hirers are trying to find is people with knowledge in VRx, CICS, JCS and various other obtuse and arcane environments for running COBOL programs and no books are going to give you that. My observation is that why people with no experience in the language get turned away. However if you do want to use the language it was one of the very first to embrace the concept of transactions and using queues as an ESB for load balancing and true modular, scalable systems. Modular COBOL systems read next item on the que to which they subscribe, get the message content, and then process it, and putting an output message onto another queue. I remember working with a retail system in NZ in mid 80s and it was doing millions of transactions per hour, using tape reels for and those old washing machine disk drives. So called "modern" tools and architectures struggle with such loads. There are banks, airline systems, finance systems the world over that were built with this stuff, and its still running not just because it works, but because nothing better (when one looks holistically at the system) has come along. Mentions in HN, loads of stars on github do not a failsafe financial system make. i code in python for own projects and c# at work(Im a product manager so im dabbling not full-tilt product dev) and frequently groan at how modern languages make simple things so hard. Yes I knows its a function of environment but sorry, I was programming systems in early 80s that did more, were more reliable, stored data safely on devices that now look only marginally better than stone tablets, and they worked. Business got done. Also bemoan my loss of productivity as i got sucked into the change-compile-rinse-repeat mentality that pc brought to the world. In old days i could get 1000 line and up COBOl programs working from scratch(no templates, no COPY) within 4 compiles and couple of days max, just by paying attention to what and how i wrote the code. End of rant. Im a huge fan of COBOL, Pascal, C#, Python, javascript, Perl, PHP when used for the right things. I have even been known to write some VB when it was the right tool for the job. Last comment - best wishes with your job hunt. As other posters have suggested, look as far afield as you need to, be brave, take a plunge, and make sure you know your fundamentals so that if COBOL doesnt work for you, you can switch to another 'dialect' of computing and try again.