Why You Should Learn COBOL | Hacker News Reader

Why You Should Learn COBOL

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13 pointsKlausTrainer8 comments

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.

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...

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.

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

But could today's programmer even learn COBOL?

http://web.archive.org/web/20050214210251/http://objectz.com...

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.

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

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

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