If you're mainly interested in games development COBOL is entirely useless. For games you might want to take a look at C#, lua or Python.

Lots of people here are starting to use C# for their tools.

Cheers
CHris

It certainly wouldn't hurt to have some knowledge of COBOL since a lot of businesses still have lots of COBOL code that needs maintainance or perhaps even porting to a more modern languages. So if your interested in that type of work then sure. As a previous poster mentioned, .Net languages are getting quite a bit of use or perhaps even Java.

Hello world in COBOL:

000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.000200 PROGRAM-ID.     HELLOWORLD.000300000400*000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.000900001000 DATA DIVISION.001100 FILE SECTION.001200100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.100100100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.100300 BEGIN.100400     DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.100500     DISPLAY "Hello world!" LINE 15 POSITION 10.100600     STOP RUN.100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.100800     EXIT.

It makes me want to cry.

if you want to get a job programming games, forget COBOL.
if you want to get a job programming other stuff, forget COBOL.

There are plenty of guys out there with decades of COBOL experience that can't get work. Companies aren't gonna hire a junior programmer when they can get a senior engineer for the same price.

Python is a good language to know (google uses it)

My recommendations, in order of importance:

1. A Lisp dialect or an ML dialect such as OCaml
2. Ruby
3. C#
4. Java


Learning a functional language will change the way you think about programming, introduce you to a lot of extremely important techniques and tools, and make you a better coder in general. The sooner you pick up and become fluent in a functional language, the better your programming will be.

I place Ruby second because you'll be able to really appreciate it after coming from functional languages - it has many functional-style features and capabilities, but can still be treated like an imperative language. It's also far more elegant than Python in many ways.

Third, C# is becoming very large in tools development, GUI apps, and even web development (in certain sectors). C# will be familiar to you from C/C++, and some of the more interesting features (especially those in the upcoming C# 3.0) will be of great benefit to you after some solid background in functional programming. It's also going to be increasingly important to be competent with the .Net platform in the coming years, and C# is as good a way as any to get used to it.

Finally, once you're comfortable with C#, making the leap to Java will be a breeze - Java is very deeply entrenched in web and business programming, and you'll need to know if eventually if you're interested in working in those sectors.