COBOL: Everywhere and Nowhere

Here’s and excerpt from an excellent and disquieting article by Coding Horror about COBOL that may have your hair standing on end – the full article is at http://blog.codinghorror.com/cobol-everywhere-and-nowhere/:

COBOL is everywhere, yet is largely unheard of among the millions of people who interact with it on a daily basis.  Its reach is so pervasive that it is almost unthinkable that the average person could go a day without it.  Whether using an ATM, stopping at traffic lights or purchasing a product online, the vast majority of us will use COBOL in one form or another as part of our daily existence.

The statistics that surround COBOL attest to its huge influence upon the business world. 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.  

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