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by DerekQ 2812 days ago
A 40 year old developer is as unlikely to have knowledge of Cobol or Fortran as a recent grad. Those technologies were as old school in 1998 as they are today.

More likely they started out working in C++, C, Java, etc. Back then more developers worked on desktop apps than web. C# first came out in 2000 (18 years ago), Python is 28 years old, Ruby 23 years old, so chances are their knowledge and experience is fairly modern apart from the current trendy web frameworks.
2 comments
voycey 2811 days ago
He said 40+ Cobol and Fortran were still kicking 30 years ago - entirely possible! Many older coders that I know kept their jobs in these languages when newer languages were taking over - Mainframes were still using them and the Banking system especially is still archaic!
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csixty4 2811 days ago
COBOL was the butt of so many jokes in the hacker culture back then. Hell, COBOL by itself was a punchline.

Lots of C++ & Java in those days. Mostly C++.

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