[J3] [EXTERNAL] Re: Comments on 23-146

[Van Snyder]

On Mon, 2023-02-27 at 17:11 -0700, Keith Bierman via J3 wrote:
> I will note that the number of committee members is probably not a
> very good metric. Otherwise, we'd all be coding in C++! (and my
> friends on that committee often lament how much easier it would be
> with fewer).

I was thinking that the number of members of a committee is somewhat a
measure of whether it has "faded into history," not a measure of how
many people actually use the language.

ISO's rule for minimum membership is four. One of the four compannies
that were members of the COBOL committee bought (or merged with)
another one, so the membership was reduced to three, and ISO disbanded
WG4.  It's likely that 2014 was the last standard. Object-oriented
COBOL and parameterized classes were introduced in 2002. Despite no
longer having an ISO standard committee, COBOL has apparently not
"faded into history." Industry estimates are that there are 220 billion
lines of COBOL being used, with about 5 billion added per year. More
companies use it than C++ or Visual Basic.NET. It is considered to be a
"high-demand niche skillset." A Stack Overflow survey found that
average salaries of COBOL programmers jiumped 44% between 2021 and
2022, the largest increase for all surveyed languages, probably a
result of experienced COBOL programmers retiring and few replacements
becoming available.


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