[PRL] [O'Reilly Radar] Cobol: The Undead Language

Mitchell Wand wand at ccs.neu.edu
Mon Oct 16 19:03:19 EDT 2006


http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/10/cobol_the_undea.html

Computerworld reports<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=266228>that
Cobol is far from undead: they surveyed IT managers, and 62 percent
actively use Cobol. Scary statistic: about 58 percent of those using Cobol
are creating new programs in it. The future news is that twenty five years
from now, we'll all be saying the same thing about Java: "what? I thought
that died in 2010 when IBM switched to Haskell! Oh no, banks are still
writing Java code—and their new programmers only want to use Smalltalk. We
can only hire 50 year olds to program in Java! Thank heavens all those
Indian programmers from the offshoring boom of the early 2000s are looking
for something to do to cover the cost of Chinese lessons ...."

And there'll still be 5% of the marketplace saying of whatever new language
is being created, "of course, this was first done more elegantly in Lisp."
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed


More information about the PRL mailing list