No, COBOL is Not a Dead Language

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

No, COBOL Is Not a Dead Language:

Even though IBM and the mainframe community pointed out that nearly every credit card purchase or ATM transaction depends on mainframes running applications written in COBOL, the perception was that any COBOL programs still in use are ancient legacy applications that need replacing yesterday.

Not so, says Cameron Seay, who teaches COBOL at East Carolina University in North Carolina and co-chairs the Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Working Group.

"It looks like there's about a billion lines a year of new COBOL code being written," he told DCK. "So yeah, while they are maintaining existing programs, there's still a lot of COBOL development underway. Quite a bit of it."

As for the shortage of programmers that were part of the story, that's not exactly true either. According to Seay, Governor Murphy's problem wasn't a lack of people with COBOL skills, but a lack of COBOL programmers in New Jersey where they were needed.

"There's this myth of a shortage of COBOL programmers -- there really isn't," he said. "There's a lot of people that know COBOL, it's just that there's a geographical issue. But COVID has forced us to address that, so people can now work remotely.

"We will have a shortage of COBOL programers within the next 10 to 15 years, because nobody's teaching it," he added, "but right now we've got plenty. It's just a question of the employers knowing where they are and allowing them to work remotely."

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