It’s not the 1st time a language/tool will be lost to the annals of the job market, eg VB6 or FoxPro. Though previously all such cases used to happen gradually, giving most people enough time to adapt to the changes.
I wonder what’s it going to be like this time now that the machine, w/ the help of humans of course, can accomplish an otherwise multi-month risky corporate project much faster? What happens to all those COBOL developer jobs?
Pray share your thoughts, esp if you’re a COBOL professional and have more context around the implication of this announcement 🙏
That doesn’t sound right at all. How could the amount of COBOL code in use quadruple at a time when everyone is trying to phase it out?
Maybe some production systems were replicated at some point and they’re adding those as unique lines?
The 2022 survey accounted for code that the 2017 survey missed?
I think it’s more likely that one survey or the other (or both) are simply nonsense.
It could mean anything, the same code used in production in new ways, slightly modified code, newly discovered cobol where the original language was a mystery, new requirements for old systems, seriously it could be too many things for that to be a useful metric with no context
Because it’s not actually getting phased out in reality
But it isn’t getting quadrupled either, at least because there aren’t enough COBOL programmers in the world to write that much new code that quickly.