Thanks for the replies
As I stated at the outset, in a somewhat throwaway line, this was an ‘extreme suggestion’.
And as you also said
he who writes code trumps the hundreds of people who want to tell them that they are doing it wrong
That belongs in a book of great quotes!
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I was an 1100 series systems programmer for several years, working on 1106s and 1110s, at the Johnson (aka Manned) spaceflight center. Before that my work for college expenses job included writing a massive Fortran program that converted an interpreted report language into even more massive Univac Cobol programs. This was in the era before their ASCII Fortran and Cobol compilers so it was all 6 bit fielddata characters. For those who don’t know, ie almost everybody, the 1100 (so named because Univac sequentially numbered their monster mainframes; when they got to 13 they write it in binary and called it the 1101) used a 36 bit words and ones complement arithmetic, 111111111111111111111111111111111111 (if I counted correctly that’s 36 1s) was minus 0, not minus 1 like this complement machines. The convention was to use octal, not hex, for expressing binary information and for several years my car speedometer going from 777 to 778 was a bit a it disconcerting. The last time I checked they still make a successor called the 2200. Still have a shelf of 70s vintage Exec8 manuals.
I’m sorry to hear that. 
I’m sorry to hear that - COBOL - my most hated language. I’m glad I never had to commercially code in it.
Back when I was a full time programmer I’d plan on less than a week to get by with a language, a month +/- to be professionally proficient, and used that for project schedules. Think it would take much longer now, especially since it seems like work and retirement is a time to play and learn new things. Attained my goal, at least when Mrs. Moose doesn’t get involved, to be a slacker. OT, reached a big knee recovery milestone this weekend and went kayaking in Bocillia Bay, with my little brother (who just hit the 6x’s) as a baby sitter, first time since April. That’ll reset after one more, hopefully final, surgery in the next couple months. As an engineer, programmer, and paramedic the whole process has been fascinating (like my heart cath and later ablation where I was awake most of the time, not at all for the knee surgeries) but it would have been more fun to be an observer and not the patient. Moose have 4 knees, so far only one has had problems, great reason to keep up with the PT exercises
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I burnt my COBOL manuals in a lovely reburner - that kept the whole house warm for ages. Most useful thing they ever achieved,
I had one of those - burnt it as well…
I wrote one COBOL program of any size, just over a box of cards, as proof of concept and then started writing the Fortran program that generated all the rest. The last time I checked COBOL programmers were getting big bucks to keep all that legacy code going. Retired, not interested…
Haha, I’m reminded of a quote from a TV show way back in the Day,
“You damn fools can’t be burning books that way! You start a fire from the bottom.” 