some university still teach cobol and fortran!! do they belong to the ice-age or I am unaware of something?

Answer 1

I hate to say it. but cobal and fortran will never die.
There are way to many lines of debuged cobol in banking and the insurance industry. They will never be replaced. It is much cheaper to train people in cobol than it is to rewrite billions of lines of business code.

It has been a while since I checked, but fortran was the best language for complex ARRAY MATH. Something greatly used in aerodynamic simulations. I greatly doubt the aero space engineers will leave fortran.

Answer 2

While they are will on their way to extinction, they are not there yet. We have a mainframe at the manufacturering plant where I work (am the IT support person) that has been running since the early 60's and is not going anywhere. So somebody has to know cobol to support it. As I am the "old man" on site, I get the job. I learned on cobol and fortran.

In 1999, they was a hugh demand for programmers of both languages because of fear that the change from the 1900 to 2000 would crash mainframes and older software worldwide. Something like that could happen again.

So there is still a demand for the skills.

Answer 3

Cobol and Fortran are not dead languages (yet...). Sure they aren't used as much as they were a decade ago, but they still have a use somewhere (and I hear the pay isn't bad).

These two languages were designed to assist in defining the business rules and logic layer for applications. Currently, we use new-fangled tools, models, and diagrams (such as UML) to describe similar rules. One could probably argue that we can define rules better and more cleanly using a UML description and OOP language based implementation.

The university probably still teaches Cobol and Fortran because they serve as a basis for understanding the concepts of business analysis and modeling of business rules. Two very important concepts that should be learned if planning on doing any enterprise level applications development.