Learning and using "old" languages ​​(Ada / Cobol / Algol)

Question

Are there good reasons to learn languages ​​like Ada and COBOL? Is there a future for programming in these languages? I am interested in these languages ​​and am currently learning them just for fun.

Answer 1

It is always worth learning new languages. Even if they will never be useful to you professionally, perhaps they will teach you something about programming that you did not know about before, or at least expanded your forecast.

As for the prospects from fast reading around, it seems that ada still stands somewhat for critical systems in the aviation industry, and Cobol still has its place in the business. I know an engineer in his mid-20 who writes all his code in fortran77 as what the industry wants!

While the number of employers looking for these languages ​​may be low because there are a limited number of people who know them, the salary for developers specializing in them can be quite high. When the critical applications developed in them can cost millions to replace the need to pay more than usual, because the encoder to support the existing system is easily accepted.

Answer 2

Ada is used in the aerospace / defense industry. COBOL is used in the financial industry. Fortran is used in technology. The question "is there any future" is a borderline subjective / argumentative, since all these languages ​​are still actively used.

Answer 3

Fortran is old, but used in scientific programming. Ada is the foundation for VHDL, a very important language in electrical engineering. You can also say that C is "old" and it is used almost everywhere.

Answer 4

Cobol and Algol are still widely used. You will not find them working for your latest and largest technology firms, but you can bet your insurance company claims this process. Your health insurance company certainly uses it. Reports of Kobol's death are greatly exaggerated.

You will find difficulties in colleges and places that will really teach you Cobol or Algol. Therefore, finding developers for these so-called dead languages ​​is becoming more and more difficult. It is very difficult to tell a child leaving high school who has been programming in Java, iOS and Perl for half his life when Cobol is where the money is.

Cobol / Algol is getting harder and harder for developers, so if you have this language in your back pocket, it will only help you. Algol is much more difficult language, in my opinion, to get good. You can teach someone with a half brain how to program in Cobol.

These languages ​​will not disappear anytime soon. While companies such as IBM and Unisys provide compilers for them on mainframes, they will continue to evolve. So, grab a book and an open source compiler and clean it up. A lot of people are looking for Cobol / Algol developers.

Answer 5

Many of these "old" languages ​​are actively used today. Lisp, for example, is once again gaining popularity in the form of Clojure . Smalltalk is once again becoming popular with the Seaside MVC framework .

In addition, many of the hottest lanaguages ​​have been heavily borrowed from Lisp and Smalltalk, both of which have become top-notch object-oriented methodologies long before C ++ came into existence. Javascript, Ruby, Perl 6, and Perl 5 Moose (Object System) use mixes that were first used in Lisp and Smalltalk. Metaclasses, first used in Common Lisp and Smalltalk-80, are reborn in Perl 5 Moose, Objective-C (iPhone development), Python, and Groovy.

Answer 6

Much like learning Latin, it can be interesting to find out where and how many words of English and other current languages ​​were at the source. In addition, if you know Latin and valuable new books / documents / scrolls that need translation, you also become valuable.

Honestly, I would say that learning them is great for a historical perspective, especially if you are a language developer, but not much more.