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I have an uncle who's about to retire after a career as a cobol dev. He tells me that he can teach me the language in two days, show me around the legacy systems of [big company you know] in two months, and then I could have a safe and lucrative career until I retire, too.

I wish he was interested in writing a blog post of war stories.

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COBOL is easy to learn if you already know how to program. What's a bit harder is learning the mainframe environment it's deployed in. It's not like Unix or DOS at all.

Yes, this exactly. Whenever I tell people I'm a mainframe developer, they always ask how they can learn COBOL. Oh, that's the easy part. The environment is very different and takes a while to get used to, but it's where COBOL thrives.

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