[Dracophoenix]

I'm not convinced. As long as someone is capable of inventing a new programming language, new libraries, or a new computer paradigm, there will always be a Wild West. If computers operated on the logic of "what's popular today will stay popular tomorrow", COBOL and Ada would be where C and Python are today.

Buttoned-down OSs existed in the form of mainframes and minicomputers up to the 90s (I'm sure you know what happened to those). Government and corporate standardization often fails more than it succeeds (e.g. respectively, OSI and CORBA), and will eventually follow the trends of the commercial market anyways. Until governments start inventing their own operating systems with 60 years of code and multiple versions of multiple programming languages and standards to reimplement, I wouldn't be so worried.

Right now, state governments and federal agencies are panicking to find COBOL practitioners. That should tell you how even respectable stations can become ghost towns.