I submitted this [0] story a few weeks ago, which led to some discussion and then being flagged since (I think) people were unsure of how verifiable the stats around COBOL were (the submitted page had more than a tinge of self-promotional language).
I was curious to ask you, as domain experts, if you could talk more to the "70% of the Fortune 500 still run on mainframes" stat you mentioned.
Where do these numbers come from? And also, does it mean that those 70% of Fortune 500s literally run/maintain 1k-1M+ LoC of COBOL? Or do these companies depend on a few downstream specialized providers (financial, aviation/logistics, etc.) which do rely on COBOL?
Like, is it COBOL all the way down, or is everything built in different ways, but basically on top of 3 companies, and those 3 companies are mostly doing COBOL?
Thanks!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644205
I was curious to ask you, as domain experts, if you could talk more to the "70% of the Fortune 500 still run on mainframes" stat you mentioned.
Where do these numbers come from? And also, does it mean that those 70% of Fortune 500s literally run/maintain 1k-1M+ LoC of COBOL? Or do these companies depend on a few downstream specialized providers (financial, aviation/logistics, etc.) which do rely on COBOL?
Like, is it COBOL all the way down, or is everything built in different ways, but basically on top of 3 companies, and those 3 companies are mostly doing COBOL?
Thanks!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644205