When applying archaeology to the intangible there can be some amazing results that can strain credulity. Try this on for size:
Today, COBOL is no longer the language of choice for computer programmers. It does, however, retain a small but important role in some software. [COBOL Cowboys founder Bill] Hinshaw estimates there are 800 billion lines of COBOL running today. [“The critical computer systems still relying on decades-old code,” Matthew Sparkes, NewScientist (8 March 2025, paywall)]
Worse yet, billion’s not even well defined in this context; the Wikipedia page for billion left me feeling like I needed a secret decoder ring, or membership in the Masonic Temple. I particularly like the references to milion[1] in that page, as the milion page didn’t seem relevant. Or is this a systematic misspelling?
But that’s all irrelevant; we can all agree that 800 billion is a big number when counting lines of code, and I have my doubts that so many lines of code, in all the computer languages of the world, have been written by the human hand.
For one thing, the hospitals would be overrun by emergency patients suffering from psychoses, neuroses, neck injuries, and carpal tunnel.
I checked the next issue of NS but saw neither corrections nor errata nor complaints in the letters column.
This reminds me of the Soviet programmer a recruiter tried to sell to my employer of the moment decades ago. He made a claim as to how much code he’d written, and I think, to satisfy the claim, we calculated he’d have to write 10,000 lines per day for … his entire life? No weekends off. It was crazy.
So I think I’ll just be boggled.
1 Nor had I ever encountered the word before, but there is such a word, presumably Latin or of Latin origin:
The Milion (Ancient Greek: Μίλιον or Μίλλιον, Mílion; Turkish: Milyon taşı) was a marker from which all distances across the Roman Empire were measured. Erected by Septimius Severus in the 3rd century AD in the city of Byzantium, it became the zero-mile marker for the empire upon the re-founding of the city as Constantinople in 330 AD. …
Its relevance to billion, however, is obscure to me.
I have no idea how much of that billion was original code..I’m thinking very little. Most efficient programs are at least paraphrased from at least one other source. Literally nothing is original anymore.
I’ve called myself a cannibal from time to time.
Hue