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Unpopular Programming Languages That Are Still Lucrative

Posted by timothy on from the psst-I-got-a-line-on-some-hot-cobol dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes In theory, learning less-popular programming languages could end up paying off big—provided the programmers who pursue them play their proverbial cards right. And as with any good card game, there's a considerable element of chance involved: In order to land a great job, you need to become an expert in a language, which involves a considerable amount of work with no guarantee of a payoff. With that in mind, do you think it's worth learning R, Scala, Haskell, Clojure, or even COBOL (the lattermost is still in use among companies with decades-old infrastructure, and they reportedly have trouble filling jobs that rely on it)? Or is it better to devote your precious hours and memory to popular, much-used languages that have a lot of use out there?

2 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. R still in heavy use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    MATLAB/R/SAS are still used a lot in life sciences and probably other businesses. I don't use them directly but have users who do.

    In the olden days I got a lot of programming and database experience iwth MUMPS (or M as it's sometimes called). Think hierarchical rather than relational databases which makes things like patient data a lot easier to sort through.

  2. Re:In Theory by bws111 · · Score: 5, Informative

    CICS is not a database layer, it is a transaction manager. The database layer is IMS or DB2. And CICS is callable from languages other than COBOL.