>Vin, you took the words right out of my mouth! It is very true that legacy apps will continue for years to come, even for a "dead" language. Can we spell COBOL?
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>And as the world turns, the marginal "programmers" will be left out. Less competition. More quality and professionalism left in.

In programming, more than anywhere else, you can safely count on the next generation of kids knowing it all. Don't know about here, but in 1984, back home (in Yugoslavia) I've seen a 16-year old having written a Fortran interpreter in Simon's Basic for Commodore 64, or a 18-year old with fluid turbulence model written in Lisp and doing maths to an arbitrary length of the mantissa.

This may be a chance of getting the janitors-turned-programmers with speedy evening classes out of the picture, and getting the bright new kids into the trade. Though, as long as there's this much money, we'll keep getting the usual bunch of those who think it's easy money.