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Unpopular Programming Languages That Are Still Lucrative
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?
Key words "in theory".
The type of businesses who need an actual expert in COBOL and not just a programmer who can pick up what they need to know need just that: an expert. You can't really become an expert without actual experience. When a company wants a COBOL expert, they want someone with 20 years experience to sort out the problems the programmers with a c++ or java background can't figure out.
I've been hearing since I was in school that the "smart" thing to do is learn COBOL and go make a billion dollars maintaining someones mainframe, but I've never heard of anyone actually doing it. Not saying it doesn't happen, just not in my chunk of visible world.
On the other hand, a friend of mine started working with Foxpro back when it was popular, and unlike everyone else, stuck with it. She makes egregious amounts of money maintaining the small number of things still using it. In her words: "keep laughing, it paid for my house".
TLDR: if you were lucky enough to have started in some old tool/language that's still used and have kept your skills up to date, there is big money. Good luck jumping into it now though.
For what it's worth:
I work in the power industry. We are upgrading to the very latest version of the application we need to operate our power plants.
It is COBOL throughout.
The vendor is taking away access to the source code soon, as the version that replaces this one will be Java. By Java, they mean all the COBOL code wrapped in Java.
So, a major application for use in the power industry will be COBOL until at least 2030.
Our COBOL devs make nearly six figures. And after our salary review is done, will get some serious raises.
They're all in their late 40s-50s. We have no COBOL people in the pipeline.
My mom says I'm cool.
Three words:
High frequency trading
Most of the code driving that is written in Haskell, which is just criminal, since it's some very bright people writing that code, and they're not contributing in any meaningful way to humanity, just fiddling bits to determine who has how much of what money at the end of each trade.
http://adtmag.com/articles/201...
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.