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Re: Return of the Applets?

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On 4/6/2015 10:36 PM, Joshua Cranmer 🐧 wrote:
> On 4/6/2015 7:03 PM, Jerry Stuckle wrote:
>> What you don't understand it - while every languages has advantages in
>> some areas, every language also has disadvantages in some areas.  The
>> two have a tendency to average out over the course of a large number of
>> programs.
> 
> If you were to claim that the plurality of existing software were coded
> in COBOL by some reasonable metric (including LOC), I would be skeptical
> of that claim without references, but I would not find it unbelievable
> (I personally think that threshold was crossed by Java, C#, C, or C++
> sometime in the last in 15 years, but I have no evidence to back it up).
> Certainly, I won't dispute that a large body of extant COBOL code exists.
>
> The claim I've objected to is not that COBOL is present in extant code,
> but rather that COBOL is the most-used language in terms of new code
> being added each year. I don't have any hard evidence of that, but there
> is circumstantial evidence to support it: other languages being more
> prevalent in academic curricula, more job advertisements, more resources
> being available, the fact that even major COBOL-users mostly limit their
> use of COBOL to maintenance of existing applications and use newer
> languages for new middleware/backend applications, etc.
>


Every state government in the U.S. has dozens of COBOL programmers;
larger states have hundreds.  The Federal government has thousands of
them - several hundred in the IRS alone.  Most other governments around
the world also use COBOL heavily.

Add to that every bank and credit union I have heard of uses COBOL, and
large ones have hundreds of COBOL programmers.  The same is true with
insurance companies and other financial services companies.  And that is
just the start.

Some of the programmers maintain current code - but the majority of the
work is writing new code.  For instance, the medical insurance companies
had huge jobs to implement code supporting the Obama Care.  And every
company had to code their own implementation.

All in all, there are a huge number of COBOL programmers out there, with
the vast majority in long-term, stable jobs.  And when the companies are
looking for new talent, they're often looking at University job fairs
and the like.  Many also use recruiters who specialize in the field.
But you won't find them on Craig's List.

And BTW, two billion lines of code per year is considered by most
experts to be fairly accurate but some think the figure is too low.  The
last figures I got were a year ago from an IEEE study; I haven't seen
figures this year but COBOL had such a lead there is no way Java or any
other language could catch up in a year.


>> Which still does not say that spreadsheets are programming languages.
>> And it's impossible to provide references to something which is not true.
> 
> It refers specifically to "The number of end-users who write spreadsheet
> programs"--if spreadsheets are programs, then what are the formulas in
> them if not code written in a spreadsheet programming language?
> 

The forumlae in spreadsheets are exactly that - they are formulae.  They
are not a programming language.  Macros are a type of programming
language, I will agree.  But few users write macros, and the majority of
the macros which are written are very simple.

-- 
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
jstucklex@attglobal.net
==================

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Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-05 09:46 -0400
  Re: Return of the Applets? Jeff Higgins <jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2015-04-05 13:12 -0400
  Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-05 15:14 -0400
    Re: Return of the Applets? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-04-05 16:41 -0400
      Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-05 16:54 -0400
        Re: Return of the Applets? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-04-05 17:08 -0400
          Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-05 17:17 -0400
            Re: Return of the Applets? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-04-05 17:30 -0400
              Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-05 17:42 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2015-04-05 17:52 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-05 18:17 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Luuk <luuk@invalid.lan> - 2015-04-06 11:26 +0200
    Re: Return of the Applets? Joshua Cranmer 🐧 <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2015-04-06 13:23 -0500
      Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-06 15:09 -0400
        Re: Return of the Applets? Joshua Cranmer 🐧 <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2015-04-06 17:33 -0500
          Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-06 17:44 -0400
            Re: Return of the Applets? Joshua Cranmer 🐧 <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2015-04-06 19:10 -0500
              Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-06 20:03 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Joshua Cranmer 🐧 <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2015-04-06 21:36 -0500
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-07 09:11 -0400
            Re: Return of the Applets? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-04-06 23:25 +0000
              Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-06 19:59 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-04-07 13:29 +0000
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-07 10:45 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-04-07 15:51 +0000
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-07 13:16 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-04-07 20:22 +0000
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-07 17:03 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Leif Roar Moldskred <leifm@huldreskog.localdomain> - 2015-04-07 11:34 -0500
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-07 13:18 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Leif Roar Moldskred <leifm@huldreskog.localdomain> - 2015-04-07 12:40 -0500
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-07 17:06 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-04-07 20:28 +0000
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-07 17:11 -0400
                Re: Return of the Applets? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2015-04-07 23:00 +0000
                Re: Return of the Applets? Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2015-04-07 19:25 -0400
  Re: Return of the Applets? Joshua Cranmer 🐧 <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2015-04-06 13:09 -0500

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