[justinator]

There's a little more to it. If your original team retires because of old age, that's a lot of wisdom lost. Not everyone wants to learn COBOL to keep planes in the air and the IRS running, imagine needing to figure out the low level code on something millions of miles away with half the hardware broken, the battery cracked and leaking – and if the software update doesn't work, the entire mission is over?

It's altogether amazing.

[ericbarrett]

COBOL is really quite straightforward and readable. I don't think a developer who's already familiar with a modern language or two would have a hard time picking it up. The system it's operating is domain-specific knowledge anyway, and would be something a newcomer would have to learn (or be familiar with) regardless of language.

[justinator]

>I don't think a developer who's already familiar with a modern language or two would have a hard time picking it up.

You're probably correct, but it's more about if they would want to pick up a language that has no future, except maintenance of already existing systems. (see: Perl).

[deepspace]

The article calls software from the 90s "old". Nobody used COBOL for mission-critical software at that time. There is embedded software I wrote in the 80s and 90s still running in the field, mostly written in C.

[justinator]

I didn't wrote that COBOL was used in aerospace, but used it as an example in different industries.

[JohnFen]

> Not everyone wants to learn COBOL to keep planes in the air and the IRS running

But there's excellent money in being a COBOL programmer. Some might be interested in that.