I just stumbled across an interesting article on COBOL, of all things. The article, titled COBOL: The New Latin, succinctly outlines the reasons why COBOL will not be going away any time soon. Unfortunately, businesses and universities are not acting upon the realities outlined in this article.
Basically, there is this over-riding perception that COBOL ain't cool. So new programmers don't want to learn it and most universities don't teach it in their computer science or information science curricula. Just like the mainframe (which is alive and well, too), COBOL is ignored and a big problem is developing. According to the article cited above, Gartner estimates that there are 180 billion lines of COBOL code in existence and about 90,000 COBOL programmers. So the author figures that "each programmer will require 100,000 hours to complete the conversion of 2 million lines. That works out to 12,500 eight-hour workdays. If we figure 250 workdays per year (though it’s unlikely any Cobol programmers are settling for just two weeks of vacation per year), these guys should be done in 50 years."
Fifty years! And that would only happen if every last COBOL programmer did nothing but conversion for 50 years. So it ain't happening. COBOL is here to stay. But who will be servicing and maintaining all of that COBOL code ten years from now? twenty years from now? With no new COBOL coders on the horizon corporations will probably find themselves paying premium dollars to keep their "legacy" applications up and running. With that in mind, if you are a youngster wondering what to do with your life, think about learning to program COBOL. And maybe learn IMS, too. That way, you'll probably have a job for years to come.