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Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, C# and Java are vaguely similar (GC languages, lots of OOP, with some FP sprinkled in, like LINQ/Streams) and some of the more popular frameworks, such as ASP.NET and Spring Boot shouldn't be too hard to pick up - so personally I'd go for both.

COBOL or FORTRAN or older languages might be okay if you want to specifically take advantage of that niche, but won't make you quite as hireable everywhere else.

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FORTRAN is for scientists who use computers to do their science. IMHE, it's not really a language used by generic software engineers, you would be expected to understand how to apply complicated math to some sophisticated problems. The place I worked for had a pipeline to turn PhDs into FORTRAN developers; CS/SE people filled the support roles and mostly wrote C & shell scripts.

Modern Fortran is easy to learn if you have Matlab muscles; there's a few additional concepts to learn because it's a "static" language, but much much easier than, say, Rust.

> if you have Matlab muscles

Heh, I recall the most recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey list MATLAB as one of the most hated languages: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-loved-...

Loved: 19.16%

Dreaded: 80.84%

That's not to say that it doesn't have a place or anything, it was just interesting to behold such a clear trend.

Matlab has OO concepts that make for much cleaner concepts.

Also: Matlab OO is hellishly slow, like having to go on a 5-hour plane trip and mistaking the Ambien you planned to take for a Ritalin.

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