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There are plenty of niche languages one can learn, that will land you niche jobs. Learning COBOL will position yourself squarely in the legacy/maintenance role

There are plenty of niche languages one can learn, that will land you niche jobs. Learning COBOL will position yourself squarely in the legacy/maintenance role for large entities (banks, governments, etc.). But, ask yourself, how long until those systems will eventually be completely revamped? Fortran is a bit more versatile, but I've only ever seen it in the defense R&D industry - which is where I worked for some years. But for the intellectual curiosity of it, sure, why not.

madduci 2y ago
> But, ask yourself, how long until those systems will eventually be completely revamped? This question is at least 50 years old. The same applies for C, Fortran. "Never touch a running system" is at giant corp a kind of Religion. Experiments through LLMs to attempt to convert existing COBOL programs in Java or modern languages have until now failed.