“The future of Y2K programmers everywhere may well lie in
Web development — at least, that’s the hope of Deskware. The
company has just released a commercial COBOL interpreter called
CobolScript….“
“Besides, COBOL programmers are not dinosaurs! They may be
nearing (or even past) retirement age — but they are Real
Programmers. They are among the first generations of programmers —
those who got into the field because they loved it, and not (like
many undergraduates today) because they’d seen people five years
older than them retire with $20 million dot-com.”
“And as they do move into retirement, most COBOL programmers
will probably continue to tinker with computers for the love of it,
creating a huge pool of idle programming talent. Think of another
2.5 million programmers working on open-source projects: people
with extensive systems programming backgrounds, experience on
realtime operating systems, and lots of free time. Irrespective of
the success of COBOL on Linux, we should try to interest these
programmers in Linux as a free operating system to use, modify, and
share.”