In the IT field particularly, if you like programming, Ada and COBOL are easy to learn, not desirable for young people because they’re not fashionable languages, and pay well because the old people that know them are retiring.
If you learn to code in COBOL, there will always be demand for your coding skills. But you’ll want to kill yourself because the only code you’ll ever get to work on is half-century-old spaghetti that has absurdly high uptime requirements.
Currently working on a programme of work for a huge client whose core system is still running the same COBOL spaghetti that was written in the 80s. The demand for COBOL developers to support or update these systems, and the compensation they get, is wild.
The course I took in college had 2 required classes for COBOL. A large majority of students did not like it, but I understand why it was (and still is) being taught. Huge demand. I enjoyed it at first, but then gradually started to dislike it, especially when getting into more complex problems. I’d have commically large files where 60-70% of the file itself is taken up by data definitions. Not to mention that the logic itself could probably be a fraction of the size in higher level languages… Not forgetting to properly tab your code was also hard to get used to. I’d consistently lose marks on that.
If you can learn to love it, it’s probably a fantastic career path…
Those who do enjoy it, I really do envy you. I really did want to like it, but it just didn’t work out.
In the last fifteen years, I’ve worked at banks, insurance companies, and telcos on COBOL, and defence contractors and telcos with Ada.
There is always talk about replacing these huge legacy systems with something in Erlang, or Rust, or even Java (!); but some of these systems are more than fifty years old, with patches on patches, so in my opinion, replacement is going to be cumbersome and impractical.
In the IT field particularly, if you like programming, Ada and COBOL are easy to learn, not desirable for young people because they’re not fashionable languages, and pay well because the old people that know them are retiring.
If you learn to code in COBOL, there will always be demand for your coding skills. But you’ll want to kill yourself because the only code you’ll ever get to work on is half-century-old spaghetti that has absurdly high uptime requirements.
Currently working on a programme of work for a huge client whose core system is still running the same COBOL spaghetti that was written in the 80s. The demand for COBOL developers to support or update these systems, and the compensation they get, is wild.
Ok, installing COBOL now 😂
The course I took in college had 2 required classes for COBOL. A large majority of students did not like it, but I understand why it was (and still is) being taught. Huge demand. I enjoyed it at first, but then gradually started to dislike it, especially when getting into more complex problems. I’d have commically large files where 60-70% of the file itself is taken up by data definitions. Not to mention that the logic itself could probably be a fraction of the size in higher level languages… Not forgetting to properly tab your code was also hard to get used to. I’d consistently lose marks on that.
If you can learn to love it, it’s probably a fantastic career path…
Those who do enjoy it, I really do envy you. I really did want to like it, but it just didn’t work out.
I was thinking the same thing lately… Which organizations do you know of using these?
In the last fifteen years, I’ve worked at banks, insurance companies, and telcos on COBOL, and defence contractors and telcos with Ada.
There is always talk about replacing these huge legacy systems with something in Erlang, or Rust, or even Java (!); but some of these systems are more than fifty years old, with patches on patches, so in my opinion, replacement is going to be cumbersome and impractical.
Give it a decade or two, and Java will be the new COBOL
People have been saying that for like a decade now
A decade ago I said it was 3-4 decades away