Cobol today
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From: Dieter Britz on 26 May 2010 02:56 I learned Cobol as one of several languages many years ago (about 1980) and although many people laughed at this crazy language, I was told that 80% of all programs in the world are in Cobol. What is the situation today? Has Cobol developed as Fortran did (another language some laugh at, not knowing that it has indeed developed). -- Dieter Britz (dieterhansbritz<at>gmail.com)
From: Alistair Maclean on 26 May 2010 10:50 On May 26, 7:56 am, Dieter Britz <dieterhansbr...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I learned Cobol as one of several languages many years ago (about 1980) > and although many people laughed at this crazy language, I was told that > 80% of all programs in the world are in Cobol. What is the situation today? > Has Cobol developed as Fortran did (another language some laugh at, not > knowing that it has indeed developed). > -- > Dieter Britz (dieterhansbritz<at>gmail.com) Cobol has developed with various standards upto about 2002. It is even capable of object orientation coding using Invokes. 80% of code in the world (not counting the millions of lines of code in Windows OSs) is still in Cobol. Depending upon whom you ask you will get different answers as to whether it is still/should be used tocay. It is still in common use; new systems are being developed in Cobol (eg Cost Modelling and Cost Calculation systems for TNT) and some people do still love it.
From: Anonymous on 26 May 2010 11:01 In article <htih0l$796$1(a)news.net.uni-c.dk>, Dieter Britz <dieterhansbritz(a)gmail.com> wrote: >I learned Cobol as one of several languages many years ago (about 1980) >and although many people laughed at this crazy language, I was told that >80% of all programs in the world are in Cobol. What is the situation today? I am not sure what to make of your use of the definite article in that last sentence. In my experience - limited as it may be - COBOL puts bread on my table and butter on my bread today, just as it has for quite a few other 'todays'. DD
From: robertwessel2 on 27 May 2010 18:15 On May 26, 1:56 am, Dieter Britz <dieterhansbr...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I learned Cobol as one of several languages many years ago (about 1980) > and although many people laughed at this crazy language, I was told that > 80% of all programs in the world are in Cobol. What is the situation today? > Has Cobol developed as Fortran did (another language some laugh at, not > knowing that it has indeed developed). That sort of stat keeps popping up, and is clearly bogus. There are probably on the order of 15 million programmers in the world, and the highest estimates of programmers working in Cobol run to about a million. And of course most programmers often write code in something other than their primary language, even if just for scripting purposes. And assuming that we have 50 years of accumulated effort by those million Cobol programmers (and unrealistically all of their work is actually in Cobol), to get to at least 21%, the other 14 million would have to labor about 11 *months*. Obviously the longevity of code and productivity need to be factored in, but the difference is so large that they won't make a meaningful difference. This statistic is often told as '80% of active code" or "80 percent of the worlds data" or something like that. One of those might have been true in 1980, but now it's just BS.
From: Pete Dashwood on 27 May 2010 22:34
robertwessel2(a)yahoo.com wrote: > On May 26, 1:56 am, Dieter Britz <dieterhansbr...(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> I learned Cobol as one of several languages many years ago (about >> 1980) and although many people laughed at this crazy language, I was >> told that 80% of all programs in the world are in Cobol. What is the >> situation today? Has Cobol developed as Fortran did (another >> language some laugh at, not knowing that it has indeed developed). > > > That sort of stat keeps popping up, and is clearly bogus. There are > probably on the order of 15 million programmers in the world, and the > highest estimates of programmers working in Cobol run to about a > million. And of course most programmers often write code in something > other than their primary language, even if just for scripting > purposes. And assuming that we have 50 years of accumulated effort by > those million Cobol programmers (and unrealistically all of their work > is actually in Cobol), to get to at least 21%, the other 14 million > would have to labor about 11 *months*. Obviously the longevity of > code and productivity need to be factored in, but the difference is so > large that they won't make a meaningful difference. > > This statistic is often told as '80% of active code" or "80 percent of > the worlds data" or something like that. One of those might have been > true in 1980, but now it's just BS. I thought I was the only one who didn't believe it... :-) Pleased to see that there are other people who think about stuff like this too. It arose out of a Gartner report that is now around 20 years old. Gartner had a vested interest in COBOL, having been retained by some large COBOL users. It doesn't take into account the fact that every year this "COBOL code base" is being eroded by more and more companies refactoring their COBOL processing, moving to OO languages like Java, VB.NET, and C#, replacing their COBOL base with packages like Siebel and SAP, and generally outsourcing their IT development requirements. It is pretty much impossible to get accurate figures as to who is using what and I have seen silly figures quoted for Java, C++, PHP, and C#, so COBOL is not alone in this. There seems to be some kind of "cuddle blanket" effect in thinking that a language is popular. Should it matter? Only as far as getting practitioners of it and support for it, I would've thought. Programming languages should not be selected based on their popularity; they should be selected on their cost and fit for purpose. (That's why I use C#... I really don't care if nobody else in the world uses it, as long as I can get help and support 24/7 for free (and I can)) Probably the nearest we can get to an unbiased estimate is found here: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html Although this is an excellent site it still can't quantify the various languages. It DOES state how it arrives at its conclusions and it says that the number of known skilled practitioners is factored into the mix. It is also careful to state that it is NOT measuring existing lines of code. Pete. -- "I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything." |