Over a million COBOL programmers in the world?
- by Lucas McCoy
I think I heard on a previous StackOverflow podcast that COBOL was used as the programming language for traffic lights (or something like that), so this got me interested. I did a quick Google search and found this little article:
Today, Cobol is everywhere, yet largely unheard of by millions of people who interact with it daily when using the ATM, stopping at traffic lights or buying a product online.
The statistics on Cobol attest to its huge influence on the business world: There are over 220 billion lines of Cobol in existence, a figure which equates to about 80 per cent of the world’s actively used code. There over a million Cobol programmers in the world. There are 200 times as many Cobol transactions that take place each day than Google searches.
I didn't really trust the source seeing as how it's on some random PHPBB forum. So how accurate are these figures? Are there really 220 billion lines of COBOL? I assume a few people/companies still use COBOL, but how many?
