Comment by jxramos

I remember a professor at Stanford for an early CS class (I'm pretty sure it was Jerry Cain) mentioning COBOL programming and drawing a graph with salary vs time for a given language that manages to be adopted widely. First when the language is rare there's a great ascent up, then as more people gain knowledge the rates drop to some minimum as the knowledge supply broadens. Then as the language shifts into a legacy context the graph ramps up again. If I remember right he claimed the ramp exceeded the initial peak in the earliest days of the language. I forget what the context was but I think it started out with a question about what languages paid the most. I think I recall him quoting a $300/hr figure for COBOL because it's so old school and the knowledgeable population so small. Then come to think of it I think he said the rates essentially drop to zero when the language is all but abandoned and transitions to modern equivalents have befallen.