> it siphons away a new gen of systems programmers over to another lang allowing me to sell my dark services for more coins
I've always been curious about whether it really works this way. First order, one would consider supply and demand leading to increased wages. But whenever I've looked into the reports of "COBOL programmers are getting paid a fortune because there are so few of them alive!", the reality has been that wages are ... unimpressive.
My hypothesis is that as the talent pool shifts elsewhere, the market dries up. For instance, new projects aren't started in COBOL any more (well, at least anywhere I've seen...). You're left doing maintenance on ancient systems, where the calculus is always "this needs to be cheaper than a new solution". Maybe it's the "liquidity" of the job market for a given language?
No doubt, though it's worth considering the tech industry is a bit more diversified now than the days of COBOL number crunchers and Space Invaders. What you're describing seems closer to PHP vs. Javascript than something as entrenched as idio-matic legacy C++.
And heck, if I'm wrong I'm sure somewhere like AWS will entomb me as an SRE, or some such, so even long after I'm RMA'd my spaghetti abominations can continue to haunt the cloud.
I've always been curious about whether it really works this way. First order, one would consider supply and demand leading to increased wages. But whenever I've looked into the reports of "COBOL programmers are getting paid a fortune because there are so few of them alive!", the reality has been that wages are ... unimpressive.
My hypothesis is that as the talent pool shifts elsewhere, the market dries up. For instance, new projects aren't started in COBOL any more (well, at least anywhere I've seen...). You're left doing maintenance on ancient systems, where the calculus is always "this needs to be cheaper than a new solution". Maybe it's the "liquidity" of the job market for a given language?