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What's kind of funny is that MUMPS is equally as archaic and idiosyncratic as Fortran or Cobol, yet there are companies willing to put new hires through a bootcamp to make them productive. Are all the Fortran and Cobol companies too small to afford a month or three of training time on new devs?

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As someone who maintains a large Fortran codebase actively maintained from the 50s, I can say with 100% confidence that syntax, compiler, and other tools aren't even 10% of getting up to speed. It's some of the worst code you will ever see. A lot of it predates "GOTO considered harmful." It also comes from an era where different common blocks and subroutines were moved into and out of memory using a custom virtual memory system.

The demand for Fortran/Cobol experience has nothing to do with training. We need to make sure you are masochistic enough to trudge through the sludge.

My guess would be that the entities short-sighted enough to still be using those languages in 2023 are also ones short sighed enough to not invest in the training to preemptively hire juniors without the skillset to train them up.

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