The post just went up, people are still writing their insightful essays on their experience with COBOL, what this means for the future of the language, and speculating as for the reason IBM is porting their compiler to Linux. Can't wait!
There's nobody here (besides maybe me) old enough to have anything to say.
Well, I worked with COBOL developer team in Canadian bank a few years ago. It is absolutely alive and well in this industry.
According to my father it is alive and well in Canadian insurance as well. But he said where he worked they don't change the COBOL code much anymore, they add features by adding layers in other languages around the COBOL core.
In th Culture books by the late much lamented Iain M. Banks, one of the oldest drones began life as a house minicomputer that over time accreted many programs and uncountable layers of software, achieved sentience by the time the Culture came about some 9,000 years later.
You’re not alone - I worked with COBOL a decade or five ago.
I worked with it about 10 years ago.
I used it back in the late 80s to handle bank account processing on a Burroughs mainframe. I got moved from a night shift sorter operator to a day shift maintenance programmer because I was literally the only available programmer in town. Had next to zero experience at the time, too.
I worked with COBOL just in time to fix Y2K problems, and I still have nightmares about it -- not about Y2K, mind you, but about COBOL and banking systems. Such a horrible, horrible programming language.