Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

> At first I almost vomited when reading this sentence:
>
> ================================================
> The Social Security Administration, for instance, has more than 60
> million lines of Cobol,
> ================================================
>
> My first thought: Cobol? Are you kidding? I thought I'd gotten done
> with that in 1985!
>
> And then a part of my mind said "sysvinit? Are you kidding? Etc.

Indeed, old doesn't equal broken. As an analogy, some of my best tools are the old ones - from when they were properly made of real metal etc.
The real problem, as you point out, is that it's getting harder to maintain the "old stuff" for the simple reason that the people that really understood it are retiring and the youngsters don't want to know. I strongly suspect a big part of the latter is a combination of the "teaching machine" and peer pressure - these "dead languages" just aren't "sexy".

But from what I've read from time to time, there's actually a good living to be made if you are happy to be one of those unseen hermits happy to bash away maintaining old code in places like banks.
The banks - they have enormous amounts of "legacy" code which isn't broken and so isn't in need of fixing. Plus, the risks to them of replacing it is quite high.