Calling all COBOLers

It's easy to joke about California's being held captive to a lack of Cobol programmers. But those Cobol programmers do exist, and we'll need them for a long time.

There you are, sipping your latte while banging out code in Django, Drupal, and Ruby, and feeling pretty cutting-edge. Sure, those are the hot skills of the moment, and they'll probably help you land your next job. But take a minute to think about the guys who came before you and the tools, particularly COBOL, they used. And give 'em some respect. They deserve it.

What brings this to mind is the rather comical dilemma faced by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger whose effort to cut (albeit temporarily) state employee salaries to the level of fry cooks at McDonald's has allegedly been foiled by a lack of COBOL programmers.

In case you missed it, California is in the midst of a distinctly unfunny fiscal crisis made worse by the inability of the Democrat-controlled legislature and the Republican governor to put together a budget. So the Governator, as we call Schwarzenegger in these parts, issued an order to cut employee salaries to the federal minimum wage for at least a month.

Putting aside the merit (or lack thereof) in his idea, state Controller John Chiang, the guy who issues the checks, says the state simply can't do it. "In 2003 my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such a task," he told a State Senate committee on Monday. "And after 12 months, we stopped without a feasible solution." D'oh!

The story has been interpreted by the media (including the New York Times on Wednesday) to make it seem like COBOL is similar to ancient Egyptian, carved on stone walls and only read by priests in loin cloths or cloistered academics. In particular, the writer quoted some bozo at Carnegie Mellon University who likened COBOL to "a television with vacuum tubes," and then said: "There are no COBOL programmers around anymore. They retired centuries ago." Wrong, wrong, wrong.

COBOL ain't dead
In 2003, Gartner estimated that there are 180 billion lines of COBOL code in use around the world and that there are still 90,000 programmers who use it. In a funny column a couple of years ago, a writer at Computerworld, our sister publication, did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured that if you printed out all that code "you’d get 50 lines per page in landscape mode. Copy paper comes in 2-inch reams with 500 sheets per ream. That figures out to a 227-mile-tall printout."