Dying Skills Died Long Ago

A little fact only few know, I started out my IT career studying the COBOL programming language and I was pretty good at it… way back then it was widely used and had a resurgence in the lead up to the year 2000 as COBOL doesn’t have the time/date problems the other computer languages did.

Now apparently it is the number one in a list of the top 10 Dead (or dying) computer skills. Guess I picked the wrong one way back when.

Having said that though I gave up on it a long time ago. The last time I touched a bit of COBOL code was probably about two weeks after I finished the course and now it’s all gone from my head, so I guess it really is dying.

For me the hard part was the the language needed to be compiled and way back then I didn’t have a computer at home and once my study stopped, didn’t really have access to the computers at the school lab.

Without a computer of my own I was unable to play with and compile my own code so it flew out of my head… but it was still a great learning experience.

For all the computer languages out in the world, the basic structure and methodologies are similar so it gave me a good grounding in the computer industry as a whole.

So thanks COBOL, you may have passed but I will always remember you fondly.