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"And a programmer in your average mainstream language in 2018 could reasonably expect to be working in the same language in 2018."

Pretty radical claim there, are you sure about that? :)

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It’s simple math, really. Let’s say we had 1 million programmers in the 80’s, writing enteprise software costing 1m * 8h * 365d * 10y = too lazy to do the math, let’s say 30 billion dollars. A lot of that software died with the companies using it, so maybe 10 billions’ worth survived, needing today N C programmers, P Cobol programmers, etc. for maintenance.

How do you think the numbers and the timespans look from a time when we have 20-40+ million programmers, working with better tools on system which are even more tightly coupled with core business functions?

Java will outlive both Cobol and cockroaches :p

"2018...2018"

Obviously you made a typo there. I was just poking fun and wondering what time frame you really had in mind.

2018 - 2038 :)

I didn't want to call out an obvious typo - but then I thought "maybe they are talking about Javascript frameworks" and then I thought "yeah - one can always hope". :-)

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