On 10/22/2013 10:01 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Curt wrote:On 2013-10-21, berenger.morel@neutralite.org <berenger.morel@neutralite.org> wrote:COBOL is still used, but tend to disappear, you can like it or not. ICOBOL programs are in use globally in governmental and military agencies and in commercial enterprises, and are running on operating systems such as IBM's z/OS and z/VSE, the POSIX families (Unix/Linux etc.), and Microsoft's Windows as well as ICL's VME operating system and Unisys' OS 2200. In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol#LegacyInteresting. I really wonder what the numbers are today, and how precepitously they dropped from 1997-2000. As I recall, the "year 2000 bug" was used as an excuse to re-write a lot of legacy code. There was also a spike in demand for COBOL programmers just before 2000 - so at least some of that re-writing probably involved tweaks to legacy code. But a lot of stuff was completely replaced.
I would say not much. If the report was from 1997, it was probably researched in 1996 and early 1997. Y2K fixups weren't in full swing yet.
And actually, only a small percentage of the code was rewritten - there just wasn't time by the time the companies discovered how massive the problem was. More often than not there were just "fixups" put into place. For instance, changing a year field in a database from 2 digits to 4 digits could easily affect thousands of programs. All of these programs would require numerous changes to the code to account for the change, and all of the programs would have to be brought online at the same time the database was converted. A recipe for major disaster, considering the time limitations.
So the programs were "fixed" to do something like "If the value is <= 10, it's a 20xx year; if >= 11, it's a 1999 year" (in fact there was a lawsuit by someone in the early 2000's who patented this method and wanted to be paid by everyone who used it - shows what's wrong with our patent system).
Once the crunch was over, they could spend the years it would take to rewrite the programs to use 4 digit years.
Note that I wasn't directly involved in any Y2K work, but I did have several friends who were. Glad I wasn't - towards the last half of '99, many were putting in 12-16 hour days, 7 days a week. The pay was great - but they were dead by the time 1/1/2000 rolled around!
And I would say the amount of COBOL written now has probably increased over 1997, although I don't have the actual figures (other than it's still the most popular language).
Jerry