Therefore no employer wants to hire somebody who writes code which almost immediately turns into legacy code
But what is "legacy" or not is not to do with technology, but fashion. Let me give you an example: everyone rants on here about what awful languages PHP and JS are. Is COBOL really a worse language than either of those? If so why? What algorithms or data structures can't be implemented in it? What tooling doesn't exist?
The only reason COBOL is considered a legacy language is because it's unfashionable, and a large part of that - I'm not even kidding - is the clothes COBOL programmers used to wear have fallen out of fashion. There's actually no reason that you couldn't use it for any application you might want to write today, and it would probably be more productive to do so than some modern languages...
COBOL has its limitations for sure, but I am an oddball because I love it. I took it for two semesters as part of my master's degree and am keeping an eye out for COBOL jobs by me. I would love to work in COBOL day in and day out.
The hardest thing about COBOL is the mainframe it has to run on. Without that access, I haven't done much coding outside of class.
But what is "legacy" or not is not to do with technology, but fashion. Let me give you an example: everyone rants on here about what awful languages PHP and JS are. Is COBOL really a worse language than either of those? If so why? What algorithms or data structures can't be implemented in it? What tooling doesn't exist?
The only reason COBOL is considered a legacy language is because it's unfashionable, and a large part of that - I'm not even kidding - is the clothes COBOL programmers used to wear have fallen out of fashion. There's actually no reason that you couldn't use it for any application you might want to write today, and it would probably be more productive to do so than some modern languages...