How widely used is COBOL?
: For over four decades COBOL has been the dominant programming language in the business-computing domain. In that time it has seen off the challenges of a number of other languages such as PL1, Algol68, Pascal, Modula, Ada, C, C++. All these languages have found a niche but none has yet displaced COBOL. Two recent challengers though, Java and Visual Basic, are proving to be serious contenders. COBOL’s domination in underlined by the information from the Gartner group. In 1997, they estimated that there were about 300 billion lines of computer code in use in the world. Of that, they estimated that about 80% (240 billion lines) were in COBOL and 20% (60 billion lines) were written in all the extra computer languages combined In 1999 they reported that over 50% of all new mission-critical applications were still being done in COBOL and their recent estimates specify that through 2004-2005 15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) will be developed in COBOL while 80% of all deployed a
