Vernor Vinge's fiction introduced the concept of the "programmer archaeologist," which seems appropriate here. He predicted that in the distant future, the ski

Vernor Vinge's fiction introduced the concept of the "programmer archaeologist," which seems appropriate here. He predicted that in the distant future, the skill of programming will have entirely shifted from writing new code (everything you need has already been written) to reading and curating old code. We may be there with COBOL already. _Understanding_ COBOL might be more important than _writing_ COBOL, so the newest variants of COBOL (like .NET) are _less_ relevant than the old stuff.