[mech422]

sounds like a good plan :-) Trick is to be on the edges - either leading edge or trailing edge. That's where the competition is lowest and the compensation is highest. I do cloud architecture/infrastructure atm, but I figure I'll fund my retirement by being the last living COBOL programmer :-P

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

That's way harder to accomplish unfortunately. Unless I study COBOL too

[mech422]

Hehe - yeah.. by the time millennials retire I'm not sure what it would be ... Java maybe ?

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I thought about that, but Java is also the most widespread language, so I don't know if it will be similar to COBOL (I don't know how widespread COBOL was)

[mech422]

COBOL was very widespread - there used to be more lines of COBOL in production then any other language (Mostly mainframe and (super-)mini computer stuff (banks, govt, insurance, etc.)

In another 20-30 years, Java might be a lot less popular then Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, etc? So lots of Java that needs maintenance and not many people left to do it??

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Unpopular stance, but the Fishtank Graph[0] tells the story.

PHP is actually a good bet.

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

[mech422]

oh yeah - Can't believe I forgot about Perl and PHP !!

Those could be good bets too. Always fun to speculate whats still gonna be around in 20-30 years :-D

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

PHP is a good bet, but it still powers 50% of the internet.

That's A LOT of websites...