[Deukhoofd]

I agree to some degree that learning a new language is easy, but learning a new language and understanding its intricacies that could cause issues in a program takes a whole lot longer.

It takes a whole lot less time for an experienced COBOL dev to understand a program than it takes for an experienced programmer who just learned COBOL to understand it in my experience.

[7thaccount]

Not just the language, but IBM mainframes and transactions and that while ecosystem. It's not like having your Python script query a SQL database. I'm sure I could learn to write sample programs like "FizzBuzz" or "hello world" in a very short amount of time. I'm not going to be comfortable writing bank software for years.

[yetihehe]

I don't know almost anything about cobol, but from what I understand, there are more intricacies than language in cobol, so yes, it takes long to learn it.

[pullmn]

Yes, I think that this article missed the point to some extent. Knowing C quite well and C++ not very well, learning the Java 'language' was quite easy. Learning the Java 'model'/'runtime' was much harder and ultimately more important.

[txdv]

Also hiring people for a language that nobody knows anymore will be much tougher.