I worked with COBOL for a good part of a decade. It’s a joy to see structured and well-commented code from pros, the consistency is such that there’s a point after a few months when you “get it”, and the code base becomes like putty in your hands.

Never have felt that way with modern platforms, with the exception of maybe Python. Old-school structured programming can be beautiful, and the tooling is super straightforward. Development these days has taken a turn for the worse in terms of sheer complexity for even simple tasks.

TL;DR: If if pays well in your market, don’t be afraid of COBOL if you’re a capable software developer. You will get it faster than you think.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It might be my area. Most COBOL infa got replaced or is on life support. But I did happen to see the good stuff once in a while. There's a reason it was not touched.

A small part of me thinks it might be the place to retire. Working on old code bases.

[–] TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 11 points 1 week ago

My last COBOL work was in a bank that replaced COBOL with Java and minicomputers with the indies servers in a misguided effort to modernize. Before that we had five mainframe programmers, after Java we had a dozen more and no one was really sure how many layers that Java onion had. People kept piling abstractions on it in another misguided effort to make it simple.