Knew a gal once who made a very good living because she was one of the last few Fortran programmers in existence.
Re FORTRAN, same with COBOL...
COBOL remains alive and well, despite its ageBy some estimates, 200,000 billion lines of code still exist. “If that 220 billion lines number is even close, then the replacement cost is probably between $4 and $8 trillion dollars today–maybe more,” he said. These tend to be large software systems and replacing them is risky, according to Kappelman.
“And there’s always the question of: Replace them with what? COBOL was invented largely to build systems to process transactions and generate reports,” which was one of the main types of processes getting computerized at that time, he said.
COBOL systems are also “quite structured and fairly maintainable,” Kappelman added. “Think of the back office systems of banks, brokerages, insurance and government organizations that are capable of processing massive amounts of transactions efficiently and quickly. It’s just overhead and there’s not really much, if any, strategic value in replacing them.”
“Not only is it pervasive, it’s not going anywhere,” observed Cameron Seay, an adjunct professor at East Carolina University in North Carolina, who teaches COBOL, and co-chairs the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Working Group.