In other words, could the lack of COBOL developers be in part due to the regular statement that "COBOL is dead?"
I'm too young to know what happened to COBOL but I guess it's both :-) The article I linked talks about the shortcomings of the language itself. I have no idea how recent Cobol dialects are but the GO TO must be hell if used in programs with millions of lines of code
Thus, it becomes more practical to find/train COBOL developers to patch the existing systems, rather than build new ones.
Yep, but they can't keep up with the amount of devs they need in rapport to the amount of code there is.
So, I'll ask again: is the problem COBOL, or that we've been discouraging developers from learning it?
I think it's both. Devs like shiny things, COBOL isn't anymore :-) It's probably also because the landscape of development isn't the same as in the 60s. Web development didn't exist back then, now web development is a huge chunk of the software development industry.
I'll give you another example. I learned object oriented programming with Object Pascal/Delphi. I loved it, it was a good language BUT they were so concentrated on creating GUI when the world was clearly more interested in developing software for the web. Delphi mostly lacked support over there, people jumped ship. Is Delphi dead? Not at all. But it's not just the fault of people saying "don't bother", of that I'm sure.
Python might be dead in 30 years but its "general purposiness" from day 0 is one the reasons why is still one of the languages that people learn every day, even if it will be 30 years old shortly ;-)
I'm too young to know what happened to COBOL but I guess it's both :-) The article I linked talks about the shortcomings of the language itself. I have no idea how recent Cobol dialects are but the GO TO must be hell if used in programs with millions of lines of code
Yep, but they can't keep up with the amount of devs they need in rapport to the amount of code there is.
I think it's both. Devs like shiny things, COBOL isn't anymore :-) It's probably also because the landscape of development isn't the same as in the 60s. Web development didn't exist back then, now web development is a huge chunk of the software development industry.
I'll give you another example. I learned object oriented programming with Object Pascal/Delphi. I loved it, it was a good language BUT they were so concentrated on creating GUI when the world was clearly more interested in developing software for the web. Delphi mostly lacked support over there, people jumped ship. Is Delphi dead? Not at all. But it's not just the fault of people saying "don't bother", of that I'm sure.
Python might be dead in 30 years but its "general purposiness" from day 0 is one the reasons why is still one of the languages that people learn every day, even if it will be 30 years old shortly ;-)
A good, balanced rebuttal (well, half-rebuttal). Thanks for the added insight!