I wouldn’t be mad about it, I hear there’s big bucks in the arcane languages.
It’s been a while since I was told this, so not sure how true it still is, but there a was a niche but lucrative market for people who could maintain stuff in Fortran, COBOL and the like.
Because there were some critical antediluvian pieces of software in banking, big businesses, etc that some companies were terrified of having to replace one day.
I’d expect that by now most would have migrated to more common languages, but I don’t really know.
I’m in IT in the financial industry. There is indeed still a ton of COBOL around.
I heard that story, too… When I started studying. That was almost 20 years ago. I’d have assumed they had moved on until now if that hadn’t been an urban myth in the first place.
A lot of codebases in skuff like fluid mechanics, meterological models, quantum mechanics etc. are still in Fortran. Largely because there is very little to gain from rewriting the code base in some other language.
I would choose Fortran for a new project 0/10 times, but to be fair, it’s a completely viable language for developing complex and computationally intensive models, and it’s better to have the 1-2 new guys learn Fortran every year than to rewrite a 200k line code base in some other language that offers few or no real advantages outside of personal preference.
Could the advantage be not having to train a small number of folks on some system no one wants to use and has very little utility outside of a few small things?
I’m legitimately asking. I don’t code at all. So, for all I know the answer could be “no.”
My parents met in a Fortran class in college.
Guess that’s an indicator for the language being much less interesting than your parents thought each other were.
There could be a version of this where it hands out Bubble, Merge, Quick, and Bogo. It is, after all, the Sorting Hat :-P
Pity the poor bastard that gets RPG. I still have nightmares about that damned column decoder sheet.
Are you talking about role playing games or rocket propelled grenades? And why would the latter be the topic of comp sci classes?
At least it wasn’t COBOL
Not to mention what you can charge being one of the few people who can still write COBOL
I used to laugh about COBOL, who can take it seriously, right? But now that I’m working in a larger company I can assure you that COBOL is the backbone of large industry. Aviation, finance, railway operations, insurance, you name it. We’re talking software running nonstop for decades.