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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.
Many jobs are lucrative, but so what? Try to do work you enjoy. If you go off trying to learn something just because it's lucrative you'll probably end up in a job where you're maintaining some obsolete system that's held together with duct tape. Not fun. Probably not worth the money for the amount of anguish it'll cost you.
Haskell code never has any bugs. But that's just because it's never used in production.
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.
I learned the one, what's it called? it has the little turtle that moves around in straight lines? Is that one still in use?
Ah, you're thinking of LOGO. It isn't widely used anymore, except as a niche language for cruise missile guidance systems.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's interesting how many programmers make decisions while ignoring the wisdom of the high school girl. When in doubt, you pick something that is popular. When you are really good at it, you pick something that is going to become popular, and by choosing it, you make it more popular.
Seriously though, it really depends on where you are, market wise, and where you want to be. There are a lot jobs around here for Java programmers that understand Spring and Hibernate. However, the people hiring for those jobs are looking for competence, and little else. You won't be able to ask for a great salary in those conditions, because while good performers aren't that easy to find, the hiring pool is also pretty large.
Instead, imagine that you have 15 years of experience, and you want to remain technical. At that point, having a decade of experience on the exact same thing won't really help you. Your selling point has to be that you've seen everything, and that you are up to date with the latest and greatest. So you don't look for yet another generic job with popular tools: You have to learn shiny new things, and sell that your know-how with many tools means you'll make a lot less architectural mistakes than a youngster. At the same time, this gives you a chance of getting into a technology early, when finding experienced people is harder. You ride the top of the wave, get paid well, and can keep in the tech switching train.
Soyou need both serious knowledge of a couple of popular languages, and then to try to spend your time working on the less popular ones, that are still growing, because that's where real opportunity is.
I work for a financial institution that rhymes with race, and im paid handsomly for nothing short of necromancy and time travel. my cobol applications interface with 50 year old cobol applications, which in turn interface with java, which runs in a godless vortex of jboss and tomcat. the accounts division I write for is beginning to suspect im some kind of evil witch that lives on the 5th floor and creates their reports over a fuming cauldron. I have in the past transferred money in my checking account using the original cobol-85 nested subprograms written to handle some of the first ATM's ever invented. Security has, on two separate occasions, mistaken me for a hobo trying to steal a laptop.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
Ah, you're thinking of LOGO. It isn't widely used anymore, except as a niche language for cruise missile guidance systems.
[Image of panicking missile controllers attempting to abort an erroneous launch by frantically typing PEN UP repeatedly.]
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'