1y ago

abandonware empires

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I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Critical government services running COBOL. Programs stored in magnetic tapes, entire offices dependant on one guy who's retiring. All that code will be lost in time, like tears in rain
- There is genuine money to be made in learning the "dead languages" of the IT world. If you're the only person within 500 Miles that knows how to maintain COBOL you can basically name your price when it comes to salary.
  I just wish I had the slightest interest in programing
  
  I've seriously looked into picking one of these dead languages up and honestly, it's not worth it.
  Biggest issue is, you have to be experienced to some degree before you get the name your price levels. So you'll have to take regular ol average programmer pay (at best) for a language that's a nightmare in 2023. Your sanity is at heavy risk.
  I'd honestly rather bash my head with assembly, it's still very much in use these days in a modern way. Most programs still get compiled into it anyway (Albeit to a far more complicated instruction set than in the past) and can still land some well paid positions for not a whole lot of experience (relatively)
  
  Been working in COBOL for a decade and this is all true.
  I'm lucky. I personally enjoy it. But i can totally see how it's an absolute nightmare for most people.
  
  Yeah everytime someone says "just learn COBOL, you'll make tons of money," it's like,
  Bro.
  There's a reason no one wants to write new software in these languages anymore, let alone maintain a forty-year-old pile of technical debt.
  
  I've been meaning to learn Fortran in part because because of the whole "big bucks for being willing to maintain old software" thing, but mostly because I'd like to work on the sorts of scientific computing software that was (and still often is) written in Fortran.

18 comments