Top Programming Languages in 2016 (Infographic)

I understood maybe half of that. My take-away from your comment is that you should share your opinion on a statement PO2 Ed C. made a short while ago:

There is a lot of COBAL code waiting to be converted to another more applicable code. . .

I think I screwed it up a tad bit, though.

One minor correction - it's COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), not "COBAL". Other than that, sounds the same as when I went to Ft. Ben. After graduating and arriving at my first assignment on Ft. Huachuca, the first question they asked me was if I knew Fortran? That was the last time I ever saw COBOL. I'm wondering if we might have crossed paths? I was at AIT in the spring of 78.

I worked in COBOL/JCL for about four years in the financial services industry. I can tell you it will still be around for a long time, as they have no intention of "converting" millions of lines of code that works, and works well. Many of the front-ends are written in newer languages, namely Java for web interfaces. The individual branches dump all their records to a mainframe at night and it's COBOL running on the mainframe as the workhorse to compile and update millions of records in batch cycles each night.

Oddly, I felt the same about Java, but after learning how much it ties into the things I want to do. . . I'd still rather learn a few more languages and make a intelligible comparison.

I spent some time doing assembly/machine code and despite some initial trepidation, it was a blast. It was for a Navy ASW system, and I was on the System Integration/Test team. The s/w developers were mostly junior folks, and all the test team was very experienced. Whenever we found any issues while testing, we were expected to not only document the issue, but also provide a solution. We'd test our expected solution by writing it as a patch which we would enter through the front panel. The process was to find the location of the problem in memory, record the contents of that location, and replace it with a jump (I can still remember that the code for an unconditional jump was "530600 "). We'd jump to an unused area of memory, input the code for our patch, ending with the code that was replaced at the original location (if it wasn't part of the problem), and then a jump back to the original code. We'd also help the programmers translate our patch into source code and implement the fix. It was a great assignment and really taught me a lot about what goes on under the hood.