This is true, but the niche should be a dev who knows COBOL IRL enough to translate to something newer. Much of the COBOL I've seen would be trivial to rewrite, just nobody wants to tackle it. A person who 1) Can read cobol 2) can communicate well with stakeholders and 3) can translate to NodeJS/Python/.NET should be able to fit this niche pretty well.
I've done this before - translate green screen apps to ASP.NET. In my case, the company had (retiring) IT staff read the cobol and give us good "plain english". The actual ASP.NET code was trivial. That said, my one caveat is I don't feel like any language today has the longevity of these systems. That code was ASP.NET 3 MVC - new at the time, but outdated now. What stack do I pick today that will still be running in 30 years? HTML+JS+NodeJS seems the most likely candidate IMO, but then you get into the various frameworks-du-jur and it sort of falls apart. Would love HN opinions.
I've done this before - translate green screen apps to ASP.NET. In my case, the company had (retiring) IT staff read the cobol and give us good "plain english". The actual ASP.NET code was trivial. That said, my one caveat is I don't feel like any language today has the longevity of these systems. That code was ASP.NET 3 MVC - new at the time, but outdated now. What stack do I pick today that will still be running in 30 years? HTML+JS+NodeJS seems the most likely candidate IMO, but then you get into the various frameworks-du-jur and it sort of falls apart. Would love HN opinions.