Based on a 2006 article I read, the following were responses to a survey conducted:
What programming languages do you use in your organization? Top 2 answers Visual Basic 67% COBOL 62%
If you don’t use Cobol, why not? Top 2 answers COBOL is an outdated language 55%, COBOL is an inferior language to other languages 34%
If your organization uses Cobol, how much internally developed business application software is written in Cobol? 43% say more than 60%, 16% say they are in the range of 31% – 50%
58% say they are using COBOL to develop new business applications.
What would the answers be today, 5 years later..2011?
My prediction would be the following:
For question #1, I would say it would be pretty close to the same. Based on the customer base I work with VB.NET seems to be a direction taken to migrate away from COBOL. This can and has shown to be a difficult and slow transition due to understanding the business rules of your COBOL applications and migration of data to a relational database. COBOL still remains a strong language with these companies. What could make these transitions easier?
For question #2, I think even though the top 2 responses from 2006 are probably way up there today, another one sneaking its way up is the fact that companies are losing their COBOL expertise due to retirement and are finding it quite difficult to replace that expertise. Is there a solution to this?
For questions #3 & #4, I think the same responses still hold true today!
So has time changed the way we view COBOL?
So has time changed the way we use COBOL?