Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language
Trying not to think how first they said they don't need us any longer, then it would be convenient if we die...
Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy has put out a call for volunteers who know how to code the decades-old computer programming language called COBOL because many of the state's systems still run on older mainframes.
In Kansas, Gov. Laura Kelly said the state's Departments of Labor was in the process of modernizing from COBOL but then the virus interfered. "So they're operating on really old stuff," she said.
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Many of us old COBOL programmers are now retired. It would take a bit of enticement to go back to work.
The 1980s. I learned Fortran on punch cards. We were required to take two COBOL classes. COBOL is an excellent language. Because it is rigidly organized, one knows where everything is. Because it was designed to read like English, it is easy to understand even if there is no documentation. The first two high-level languages that were widely used were Fortran and COBOL--Fortran was mostly used by the sciences and COBOL was mostly used for business, and they were both awesome for the time that they were created. They beat the hell out of having to write something in assembly language or machine code. If someone wants to create a simple business program to say, handle timecards or payroll, COBOL is great for that because the code is very understandable, and the common routines for it were written decades ago.
Sure, a lot of things have changed since the 1980s. Computers have about a million times more memory and run about 100,000 times faster. The Windows 10 computer that I am typing on right now has more computing power than a thousand computers from the 1980s. I've learned lots of other languages besides Fortran and COBOL, like RPG, BASIC, Pascal, Assembly Language, Machine Code, C, C++, C#, Java, and on and on, and I've used a hundred different types of computers. It's all writing programming code on machines, and I have been able to do a lot with whatever language that I used on whatever machine that I used.
I don't judge people for the programming language they use. I judge them on their skill at getting things done with whatever language they are using. All code compiles or interprets to machine code, and every language that is quicker to type out is harder to read by someone who did not write the code. There are always tradeoffs.
When one is a memory typist, as I am, one does not care if COBOL makes one type a few more characters, and I would rather debug a rigid language like COBOL than someone's sloppy R, Python, or Javascript code. If Mary Poppins coded, she might choose COBOL. It is the "A place for everything, and everything in its place" language, and it reads so much like English that it is easy to modify. Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, and Differenitial Equations are all way older than COBOL.
Yet, people still use them to do all kinds of amazing things. COBOL allowed me to create numeric and data strings in 12 dimensions like it was a piece of cake--in the 1980s--on machines that had 1% of the power most kid's cell phones have now. It was brilliantly put together and powerful as hell, and millions of people's parents and grandparents got proper paychecks because of it. Respect the brilliance and elegance that was, and is, COBOL. 
I've not programmed for the past ten years, and I had no idea new COBOL code was being written. My natives are F-Level COBOL and PL1.
