Learn COBOL!
No, seriously, do it. According to people in the know, there are 220 billion (that’s billion with a B) lines of COBOL in use as we speak, and there are another five billion lines being added to that every year. Now, what happened to the whole ‘everyone is rewriting their COBOL and FORTRAN applications in Java’ mantra we heard at the turn of the century? I mean, here we are in ought-four and there are still 250 billion lines of COBOL out there, and that number is going up. Could it be that Java really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Then again, let’s remember the words of Paul Graham (a highly intelligent guy):
I predict a similar fate for Java. People sometimes send me mail saying, “How can you say that Java won’t turn out to be a successful language? It’s already a successful language.” And I admit that it is, if you measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it (particularly individual books on it), or by the number of undergrads who believe they have to learn it to get a job. When I say Java won’t turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.
 The Hundred Year Language
To be fair, Graham was talking about programming language evolution, not usage. But, if you believe that you need Java to get a job, you should damned sure that you need COBOL as well. To that end, I am going to start trying COBOL in my spare time. And I will compile any useful links I come across in this space.
via Tim Bray
