I don’t usually post entries that just refer to someone else’s post and then comment, but I thought this one was worth it.

For the sake of comparison, people have been saying that Cobol has been dead for more than 20 years, but there are over 1000 Cobol jobs per month posted on Monster.com, and more than 5000 per month for Perl. JT Smith, posted by chromatic on O'ReillyNet.

Everyone got that? Perl is doing absolutely fine as a language; there are still heaps of jobs going for COBOL programmers, and Perl has even more! Clearly this is the only measure of a language’s health and therefore we should all kindly stop pointing and laughing.

Personally, I think this couldn’t come sooner. A technology isn’t really dead until people feel the need to loudly proclaim how not dead that technology is. People have been declaring the end of C++ since Java first arrived, but no one is defending C++ yet… more’s the pity.

Oh, and I particularly love his analogy to COBOL programmers: smooth.