When I was studying electrical engineering at the University of New Orleans, FORTRAN was a required course in the curriculum. While FORTRAN is a "dead" programming language now, learning it provided a foundational understanding of how strings and rows of typed characters can create countless things, from a simple HTML webpage to artificial intelligence. A simple omission or misplacement of a single character can mess up an entire code, and it can consume considerable time to debug a single issue.
COBOL, another obsolete programming language, is still widely used in U.S. government mainframes, and it was hindering efforts to modernize the computer systems because Elon Musk's DOGE team of "whiz kids" don't know COBOL.
This reminded me of the plot of Space Cowboys: An old Russian telecommunications satellite from the Cold War era needs to be fixed, but there's another problem. It's using a stolen American design that's so old that nobody at NASA knows how to fix it.
Following the renewed interests in NASA in the 1990s--thanks largely to Ron Howard's film Apollo 13--Space Cowboys is cleverly written with a little dose of comedy and also features an excellent cast with Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner. Space Cowboys has aged well (no pun intended) and is still one of my favorite movies from Clint Eastwood, who also directed and produced the film.
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