Mike - I currently do work with big data and big data warehouses, which is trendy and pays quite well. But I've been offered gigs to do COBOL and PL/1 work which have a significantly higher hourly wage because all of the "old" programmers have retired or died off! I still remember in the early 1980's when I was told that "COBOL is a dead language, it has no future" Just as with the dead language of Latin - if you want to become a doctor you had better learn it...

p.s. If you'd chosen the Tour-de-France picture I'd be up at bat by now!