COBOL was created 50 years ago by Grace Hopper. According to an article in CIO Magazine, the maxim to a first approximation, all programs are written in COBOL appears to still be true:
There are over 220 billion lines of COBOL in existence, a figure which equates to around 80% of the world’s actively used code. There are estimated to be over a million COBOL programmers in the world today. Most impressive perhaps, is that 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches — a figure which puts the influence of Web 2.0 into stark perspective.
Pretty impressive for a fifty-year-old “obsolete” programming language.
Update: Jeff Atwood has a blog post on the same topic COBOL: Everywhere and Nowhere. I’ve never met anyone who was actively writing COBOL code either.
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