Computerworld reports that Cobol is far from undead: they surveyed IT managers, and 62 percent actively use Cobol. Scary statistic: about 58 percent of those using Cobol are creating new programs in it. The future news is that twenty five years from now, we’ll all be saying the same thing about Java: “what? I thought that died in 2010 when IBM switched to Haskell! Oh no, banks are still writing Java code—and their new programmers only want to use Smalltalk. We can only hire 50 year olds to program in Java! Thank heavens all those Indian programmers from the offshoring boom of the early 2000s are looking for something to do to cover the cost of Chinese lessons ….”
And there’ll still be 5% of the marketplace saying of whatever new language is being created, “of course, this was first done more elegantly in Lisp.”