Do you know COBOL? It's a programming language that most people think of as a dead langauge. I was at a meeting tonight with people from a number of companies. Well one was a government concern and the other an Ma insurance concern. Both were talking about new devlopment projects that were being written in COBOL. Oh the front ends are VB or HTTP/JavaScript but the back end and database processing are being written in COBOL. Apaprently finding good COBOL programmers is difficult (a lot of them are my age i.e. old in computer time) and taht rarity demands a high price. COBOL progammers make good (sometimes very good) incomes. Who knew?

COBOL is a very different langauge from Java, VB, C#, C, C++ or any of the other langauges commonly taught today. I tend to think that students not only learn too few languages in university they learn too few types of languages. All OOP languages are pretty much the same. What about learning functional languages? What about data languages? What about old fashioned non-obkect oriented languages?

I'm pretty lucky I guess. I've been around a long time, learned a bunch of languages an am able to look at things from different angles. I owe a lot of it to my university professors who insisted that we learn a bunch of languages and allowed me the freedom to learn still more. Even without the langauge structures course which looked at many languages I learned three languages (FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL) very well, two different assembly languages and could read several more higher level languages by the time I graduated. I wasn't a CS major BTW. We didn't have CS majors back that long ago. :-)

That experience made it easy to learn new computer languages and I've probably learned a new one on average every 2-3 years since then. I hope that never stops either.