Thu, 23 Sep 2004 16:04:19 GMT

5,000,000,000 per Year. I had a talk today with Make Technologies, I‰¥úve known them a long time and I have some shares. They‰¥úre doing a lot of work on legacy conversion, both methodology and technology; helping people who have mission-critical applications that they want to move to modern infrastructure, specifically J2EE. I knew that this was an interesting space (even post-Y2K) but I was flabbergasted when Mike Hagerman (Make‰¥ús CEO) told me two numbers: There are five billion new lines of COBOL getting created every year, and there (wait for it) 220 billion lines of COBOL in production. (Holy cow, now that I think about it, I bet I wrote ten or twenty thousand of them). Mike got the numbers from Gartner. That‰¥ús… scary. [ongoing]

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the numbers are huge, and if true, imagine how much is being written in terms of scripting languages adn such…. it must be an immense, unimaginary number…… that is what i call production.