Re: [PLUG] Fw: [plug-announce] Tue Apr 12 - PLUG North - "Modern Cobol" by Elizabeth Joseph and Walt Mankowski (7pm EDT online)

["Elizabeth K. Joseph via plug" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 8:57 PM JP Vossen via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> For PLUG, thanks for Lyz and Walt for some neat information and discussion.
>
> For everyone, this topic came up because I mentioned I was reading a fascinating book that just came out:
> * https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/modern-mainframe-development/9781098107017/
> * _Modern Mainframe Development_
> * by Tom Taulli
> * Released March 2022
> * Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
> * ISBN: 9781098107024
> * 345 pages
>
> It says...pretty much everything Steve says below, and a lot more.  According to ch04 and per https://oreil.ly/L8Lcz:
> * Every day 200 times more COBOL transactions are performed versus Google searches.
> * More than 220 billion lines of code are running today, or about 80% of the world’s total.
> * About 1.5 billion new lines of COBOL are written each year.
>
> That does not match up with the numbers Lyz had, her COBOL LoC number was WAY higher.  But still, interesting.

I dug in a little bit to the slide deck[0] that's linked to the
YouTube video link in the book, and it looks like these numbers were
gathered in June 2020 and they're cited often, but I don't see a
reference for them immediately available. The numbers I shared were
from other surveys from 2021. The thing to know about all these
numbers is that they're all estimates based on extrapolation from
companies who do participate in the surveys, and then those who are
also known to use COBOL and educated guesses about their usage.

So in my presentation last night, I actually had three numbers for
lines of code out there: 200 billion, 250 billion, and 800 billion.
The first two came from the same survey by the Open Mainframe Project
COBOL Working Group, as a conservative estimate (250 seems to be where
they finally landed after full analysis) and the 800 billion came from
a second survey from Micro Focus, which is the vendor for Micro Focus
Visual COBOL, one of the versions of COBOL out there (COBOL is a
standard, so there are several versions of it, including GnuCOBOL and
Enterprise COBOL for z/OS). I've seen estimates as high as 8 billion
for the new lines of COBOL code written each year.

I didn't mention the number of transactions, but it's something we
talk to students a lot about. The sheer volume of something like
credit card processing, especially when you factor in things like
AI-driven fraud-detection that needs to happen in milliseconds, is
really in a class of its own. Turns out, enterprise computing is a
real thing that does seriously heavy lifting.

Anyway, even though it's still virtual, it was fun getting to see some
familiar faces and hear familiar voices last night!

Here's my deck that has links to the above references, along with
links to the Open Mainframe Project resources:
https://princessleia.com/presentations/2022/phillylinux_modern_cobol_2022.pdf

Hope to see you all in person soon.

[0] https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/viewdocument/cobol-for-business-application-prog

-- 
Elizabeth K. Joseph || Lyz || pleia2
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