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A comment on 45 years since its creation. The C language still very popular. Parent comment

Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by jacquesm on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @12:57PM (#11763218)
COBOL is anything but dead (unfortunately).
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Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by hyperpape on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @01:13PM (#11763393)
Are there really that many new projects in COBOL, or is it almost all maintenance/extension of existing code? That's where I'd put the cutoff.
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Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @01:28PM (#11763565)
Gartner puts it at 5 million lines a year:

http://blog.insight.com/2010/10/cobol-still-in-action/

They write as much as they can outside COBOL. Those 5 million lines are for extending old programs or integrating new things into them. Some new programs are presumably written as well since... well, it's COBOL programmers writing them. ;)

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Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by jdcskillet on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @02:10PM (#11764064)
I believe the company I work for is writing just under 500K lines of COBOL code per year... now... how much of that is "new" vs extending vs maintaining is a good question. It is very difficult to measure those things in our environment. If you were to ask the 60 - 75 mainframe programmers we employ, I'm sure they would answer that COBOL is very much alive, and no matter how hard you try to kill it, 40 years of system code is just not going away any time soon (depending on your definition of "dead"). Especially as we hire a good amount of "new to us" people to maintain the system.

I think individual companies should define a language as "dead" based on the number of new people needed to maintain the systems. As the number approaches less than 5%(?) of your replacement hires, have you effectively "killed" the language? At the very least it is on life support, and a decision needs to be made about its future. (A grim analogy, I know).

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Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @02:15PM (#11764109)
Well, are we talking dead or just obsolete? It can't be dead if it's actively being developed with significant amounts of money and tooling improvements (eg MicroFocus). It can be obsolete, though, if it's taking up a tiny percentage of new code or hires as you said that keeps going down.

I agree one should try to phase out something on life support. Gradually at the least.

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Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by jandrese on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @01:45PM (#11763753)
5 million lines really isn't that much in the grand scheme of things.
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Re:45 years since its creation. The C language still very po... by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @01:59PM (#11763941)
It's not a lot. Yet, it's extra code extending critical apps with billions of lines of code and running more transactions than Google does searches. That's a large impact in the grand scheme of things.

Also, how much C was being written in UNIX 1.0 days outside of ports of same, exact software? :P

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