Let's remember that in those 42 years the number of BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL jobs has diminished through to almost nothing. The last person I met who described

Let's remember that in those 42 years the number of BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL jobs has diminished through to almost nothing. The last person I met who described themselves as a COBOL programmer was about 10 years ago, and even they said they did it for the money as there were so few of them left. They haven't really diminished to almost nothing, they have just been outsourced to Indian shops. You'll have a really hard time finding Westerners who still write those languages, but Indian firms are happy to step in and fill that void, maintaining the hundreds of millions of lines of COBOL code still in production at Fortune 500 companies, on a contract basis.