

Why You Should Learn COBOL  - KlausTrainer
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/06/why-you-should-learn-cobol.php

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s_henry_paulson
_According to Gartner, 85% of the world's businesses data was still being
processed in COBOL as recently as 2001_

Why would you use decade old technology statistics to prove any point?

If someone told you that an extremely large number of websites in 2001 were
written in classic ASP, would you start considering it as a career path?

I agree that COBOL will still be around for awhile, but a lot can happen in
11-12 years, and this leaves the reader to wonder what the market is currently
like.

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jackhoy
Was curious to look this up - doesn't appear to have been much movement (see
below from 2011)

"It is estimated that there are approximately 200 billion lines of COBOL code
in production, with 5 billion lines of new code added to these highly valued
core production systems each year. As much as 70% of business data worldwide
is stored on mainframes and approximately 80% of daily business transactions
are processed in COBOL. There are about 1.5 - 2 million developers globally
developing and maintaining COBOL code today.

[https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/in...](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/invisiblethread/entry/a_rational_approach_to_enterprise_modernization-
part1?lang=en)

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cafard
I know a teeny bit of COBOL. I'd say that if I were to learn it, it would be
with a view of learning to generate it from a meta-language so that all the
indentation strangeness and record layouts and so on could be done more
easily.

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jetti
I've thought about something like this. However, it just seems like too much
trouble to be worth it.

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nlz1
But could today's programmer even _learn_ COBOL?

[http://web.archive.org/web/20050214210251/http://objectz.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050214210251/http://objectz.com/columnists/martin/02252002.asp)

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actsasbuffoon
The number of available jobs are meaningless without salary information. I
suspect that the average COBOL developer makes much less than what the typical
HN reader would consider competitive.

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cnlwsu
Interesting enough I did a quick search, found hundreds of java/python jobs
and 2 cobol jobs... in the entire state.

~~~
Ilemi
Just did the same search in the UK with a similar result. Surprising barren
prospects given the upbeat nature of the article.

