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> > My point was not that the investment in COBOL is a recent phenomenon, > > but that it's continuing -- COBOL didn't die in the 80s. There are about 2 > > million COBOL programmers versus 3 million Java and 300,000 Perl. > > Where are those numbers from, Ken? The Java number was from an IDC report, the COBOL figure from a Gartner report *. Information Week published a different figure in May 2003. It forecast the number of Java programmers would equal the number of COBOL programmers by 2004. > prefers to forget the 100,000 or so lines of COBOL Some people chose COBOL but more often it was simply a mandate. Large corporations, government programs and ISVs working on multi-platform products were the largest adopters, but I remember one ISV converting a COBOL bill-of-materials application to 8-bit micros running CP/M. At the other end of the spectrum was a friend's experience with Y2K remediation at a large energy company. For taxes alone, she had programmers working on 1500 COBOL programs. In twenty years, this thread will probably be something like this: "Our systems are so old, we still have XML documents and parsers." "That's nothing -- we have COBOL programs." * Slides with statistics about market share, adoption of various languages, J2EE, .NET, bio-cybernetics, application servers, and other technologies: http://www.webservicessummit.com/Trends/ComputingTrends_part2.htm
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