What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?

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Do a little research into COBOL and a few interesting things jump out at you. Some of this information is from Gartner Group and the rest can easily be verified by doing even a brief survey of the field. Taking the following bits of information:

* 75% of the world's business data passes through COBOL (Gartner Group estimate)

* There is possibly up to a fifth of a trillion lines of COBOL code out there (Gartner again)

* People are still writing COBOL constantly, but usually on existing systems.

* The industry is struggling to find new COBOL programmers because few young programmers love the thought of maintaining decades-old enterprise systems where all data is global and GOTO is often the first choice in flow control.

* Many companies want to move from COBOL, but can't do so easily because too much code is written in COBOL (and the source is often lost).

People really, really underestimate these problems. For example, I've seen several companies express a desire to move away from Perl but find out they can't because they don't realize quite how reliant on the language they are.

Now imagine a multi-national corporation with several million lines of COBOL code. What are they going to do?

COBOL salaries, from what I've seen, are trending upwards. Older programmers are sometimes being enticed out of retirement to maintain legacy systems (this is rather hit or miss as there appears to still be some age discrimination here). There are companies out there offering software to allow COBOL programmers to write NetBeans, integrate with .NET code or simply translate the COBOL into other languages (the latter appears to have mostly been a disaster, but I don't have enough hard data on this).

So let's summarize the above:

* Trillions of dollars flow through COBOL. * Trillions of dollars flow through systems that businesses want to replace. * Current mitigation strategies involve supplementing COBOL, not replacing it.

You come up with a strategy to allow COBOL systems to naturally migrate to a new language and you stand to make millions of dollars. By the way, I said "naturally". There are things like COBOL to Java translators (e.g., http://opencobol2java.sourceforge.net/), but COBOL is procedural and all variables are global. It doesn't even come close to mapping to an object-oriented paradigm (and any experienced OO programmer will understand why).

I actually have what I think is a decent migration strategy for COBOL, but that's a story for another day.

And this appropriately grumpy rebuttal from a JPL guy to the 2004 "Petition to Retire Fortran" makes some good arguments for not retiring it (and also gives some Ada love): http://www.fortranstatement.com/Site/responses.html

Thus a Fortran compiler doesn't have to do anything special to make sure it preserves order when storing and accessing from two different arrays. Therefore the compiler can be much more aggressive about unrolling loops and changing the order of operations.

By contrast, given a loop like

  for( i=0; i

  for( i=0; i