via Ed Cone

Okay, I am a bit provocative ;-)

Cobol is surely not the development language you want to program with as Software Engineer today.

On the other side, one figure remains in my mind since more than 12 years. In 1995, there were more than 80 billion (billion, not million) SLOC (single line of code) developed in Cobol worldwide and in production. 80 billion! People thinking that you can get rid of these in the midterm are just….wrong ;-)

It was funny to read this post of Ed this morning:

And the hot new tech job is…COBOL programmer?

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but readers of this post about antiquated Pentagon systems are crowing about demand for old-school skills.

Says a commenter who goes by “Sing”: I do not know any young programmers that are interested in learning COBOL, but I do know a lot of older programmers that are looking forward to the inevitable jump in salary.

A recent report claimed that 65 percent of core systems at surveyed companies in the insurance industry were written in legacy code, including COBOL. And a computer science prof I spoke with says the skills crunch is for real, with big iron outlasting the folks who know what to do with it.

Related: Vint Cerf says, “Over time the bits we accumulate that represent value will not be able to be interpreted. We have to maintain the meaning of the data we accumulate.”

I am working in the Insurance Industry for a while and I personally think that much more than 65% of the legacy systems are written in Cobol… My perception is that we are near a 80-85% level, at least… Perhaps more the case in Europe? Could be!