8 ms·

I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in pr

I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in production: http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-government-it-professionals-manage-legacy-code http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-gover... This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization-runs-on-mainframe.html http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization... Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly re-educate myself on a daily basis I forget that there are still a lot of very, very old systems out there.

keefe 16y ago
I did some work at the #3 retail grocer in the world and they have an improbable amount of cobol and cobol-apps running as of 2007. Some of these were running on old IBM mainframes from the 80s and perhaps even 70s, including some exciting IMS databases.
kbob 16y ago
That's slightly less impressive when you remember that it takes about 1,000 lines of Cobol to write Hello, World.
- jpr 16y ago
  According to Wikipedia, only 5 lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol#Hello.2C_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol#Hello.2C_world