I've heard this sentiment about Cobol often. As someone who has never seen Cobol or used it, how hard would it be for me to specialize in Cobol maintenance and porting? Is it really as impenetrable as it seems, requiring years of experience, or can someone like me work through a few books and get on it?
With this kind of thing you never know when organizations move away from the technology en masse and it would be great to be in it at the time.
I have used FORTRAN quite a bit and I assume that the situation with Cobol is similar. If you go into it with an open mind you will soon see common patterns that look crazy from a more modern language point of view but were widely used in that language. My FORTRAN code was full of GOTO which looks horrible today but that's how things got done and once you are used to it it makes sense.
Now the other question is whether it makes sense to get into Cobol from a career or business perspective and I am not so sure about that...
Is it a bad idea? I see articles like this all the time, and job postings with decent pay, $100k+ on Indeed. Maybe long term it's a bad idea to invest in a technology that's bound to disappear.
I would expect the number of actual jobs or contracts to be pretty low. Maybe better to attend a data science boot camp and make 100k+ that way with a better path to the future.
With this kind of thing you never know when organizations move away from the technology en masse and it would be great to be in it at the time.