[Info-vax] Licenses on VAX/VMS 4.0/4.1 source code listing scans

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/11/2021 8:20 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>             Kind of like COBOL.  It is probably one of the
> most used languages for serious business applications in use
> today.  Some of the largest information systems in the world
> are written in it.  Everybody is affected by its use every day.

If an application:
- is processing money
- first version was written before 1995
- has not been rewritten after 1995
then there is a good chance that it is in Cobol.

And a lot of those applications are very important applications.

But I am not so sure that it is one of the most used languages.
The estimate is that Cobol is about 200 billion out of 3 trillion lines
of code (7%). And based on hiring statistics it looks like Cobol
work is like 1% of development work being done.

And all the largest systems are distributed. They use
Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka etc.. Traditional technologies
does simply not scale to that level.

> And yet, because academia continues to denigrate it and refuses
> to teach it the pool of technicians competent in its use continues
> to drop.

Very few new people learn Cobol.

But is there a need for more Cobol programmers?

If there were then the salaries for Cobol programmer would
sky rocket.

It has not.

Arne