So is COBOL dead or not?
COBOL is like a 90-year-celebrity: we have mourned its death many times, only to realizes that the person is still alive. Every so often tech journalism runs a feature about how COBOL is not really dead. There is a secret vibrant COBOL programming community thriving on the billions and billions of COBOL code. Then the comments for these threads follow this patterns: someone claiming to be a COBOL programmer talking about their work life; a string of former COBOL programmers talking about how much they hated the language; and a cynical poster pointing out that the stories about COBOL's survival are all being pushed as PR stories by the mysterious companies that still create COBOL compilers company. This is truly a topic that engenders the greatest apathy, so I have yet to find a story on tech journalism to debunk or confirm the claims of the longevity of COBOL. Overall, it seems that people hear COBOL, yawn, and go back to playing Candy Crush. Thus I must investigate and get to the bottom of it. What is