The article is here. I found it looking for COBOL-related graphics we can use for inspiration to lighten up this Web site. This was five years ago. The statistics were developed for (and published by) Microfocus. 220 Billion lines of code, 1.5 Billion new lines of code a year. I was tempted to “borrow” those statistics charts … but they don’t agree with other numbers we saw around that time.

It is worth the read. Not much has changed since then. And we don’t expect much to change going forward. COBOL is and will remain the premier language for basic business applications (the back office … green-eyeshade kinds of stuff). It will start to move expensive hardware platforms and away from expensive software platforms, just like Relational (SQL) DataBases and other core technologies. That’s where want to contribute our piece.