

COBOL's Not Dead - solipsist
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/01/cobols-not-dead-in-the-enterprise.php

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cao825
I started at a company 2.5 years ago as a COBOL programmer and am now a
Software Architect for the company. I would say that COBOL still runs a very
large percentage of business systems (especially banking). Our system does
even implement GUI and we are starting to use a form of MVC for new
development.

While I think most companies that have COBOL systems want to get rid of them
and move to a newer language, doing so is going to take a very long time. My
company has wanted to move from COBOL to a higher language for over 5 years
now and never been able to prove the business case. The language will be
around, at least in maintenance if not development for at least another 20
years imho.

The big problem that companies are having is that the majority of COBOL
programmers will retire in the next 5 years and new college grads don't have
experience with it and don't want to learn it because it is considered "dead"
by mainstream CS. That means those that actually know the language stand to
make a very large amount of money in the coming years helping big banks
convert their systems, when they have nowhere else to turn.

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mindcrime
There's even a little bit of activity on the /r/cobol subreddit:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/cobol>

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maxharris
COBOL is dead. This is just another press release from Micro Focus, a
legacy/COBOL vendor. If you're fooled by this, you're not thinking critically.

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cao825
I think you need to define dead. If you are saying it is dead in the sense
that there is no new development being done on it and/or it is not in high
use, then you are completely mistaken. I would say the best "dead" definition
for it is: any company looking to implement a new system would not choose
COBOL as their language. In that sense, it is technically dying, but
definitely not dead.

