The State of California still uses
COBOL for the whole (hole ?) Gov.

They call the gray beards out of retirement(?) to work on the systems.

A student who learned Pascal in the 1980s could pick up C and Ada without too much trouble. Java and C++ would have been harder, but possible. A student who learned COBOL (at least, the version I used in the 1970s) would be completely unprepared for learning other languages -- it is (or was) just too primitive.

I've just looked on Jobserve and it has 30 jobs with Cobol. Most are in the USA, to be fair. Pascal has zero jobs. C# is a tad ahead at 632 jobs.
I think this press release is transparent sales promotion. Cobol is being dumped as fast as people can afford to. That's probably not very fast but is not enough to feed most people.

"steady source of income for 'aging' programmers"

This is true but I know for a fact COBOL is not the future for a career in software development for a graduate.

Proof COBOL is running in the back end and requires no changes, but this is just a speculation :-).

The real proof is that I live in London and I cannot find a single job that sites the term COBOL - I guess the industry still require COBOL to run but do not however require the skill set.

Maybe they will require the skill set COBOL soon is what they always say. Still waiting in a QA job for all that money I will get when COBOL is in demand.

Graduates you have been warned!!!!

This article is little more than marketing copy, ie Complete Crap. Some idiot writer takes the marketing BS of the ONLY PROVIDER OF NON MAINFRAME COBOL at his word. This guy should be fired for gross incompetence.

Tom,

Well said, Sir. It is probably the case that a COBOL Master makes Excellent Good Beta Use of all Programming Disciplines/Languages, which is not something which many/any others can say with Undoubted Confidence.

"It makes the computer studies teachers who insisted on people learning Pascal instead of COBOL in the 1980s look like right twits".

I wouldn't say that at all. It just depends what you want to accomplish, and what the constraints are. For programming standard business applications, Cobol is hard to beat. But you wouldn't write avionics in it - C or Ada suggest themselves. Nor Web software - there is a plethora of fashionable stuff to do that, from ASP.NET to Groovy on Grails and beyond.

To use a hackneyed and no doubt inadequate analogy, just because some people are using rockets to land on the Moon and others zip around in Porsches, that doesn't make the humble goods lorry obsolete. Contrariwise, there are more of them than ever - some carrying Porsches or rocket parts.

It makes the computer studies teachers who insisted on people
learning Pascal instead of COBOL in the 1980s look like right twits.

Well I'm using Pascal (FPC/Lazarus) to develop one of our company's products right this minute.

I must be a twit!

There are apparently shedloads of open sauce compilers

I'm quite happy they have managed to ketchup with today's technology.

COBOL programs are one of the fastest and it's quite simple to program.

... but it's been providing me my daily bread for the last 18 years! And lately, since cobol programmers are quite scarce, it's been providing a good bunch of daily bread. Yep, there's no fancy stuff (objects, inheritability and other "modern" structures), but wrapped with some nice front-end it works fine. Actually, if it was correctly developed, lots of ancient code still run intact and a new front-end makes them appealing to users. We may as well be old farts, but our niche is very, very comfortable!

Cobol has never been away, so it can't come back. It has been unfashionable, which may look like a problem to those whose universe is circumscribed by fashion.

Which might be true... but it's not a great source.

BTW, your captcha can be defeated semi-reliably with:

gocr -i img.jpg -C A-Z

Not a whole lot of tweaking required.

Damn thunder woke me up last night and I just woke up this morning in a /mood/...

COBOL due a comeback?

Given that COBOL jobs constituted all of 16 in every 10,000 developer vacancy ads in a recent survey (source: ITJobsWatch), it's got a long, long road to travel first.

Even the venerable BASIC does better: VB and VB.NET together made up 7% of jobs (same source).

Perhaps the teachers should have been teaching BASIC instead of Pascal?