Re: Could you write a BSD like os in ADA?

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> > 95% figure with regard to transactions sounds very questionable. Most likely you made it up.
> 
> I don't know; there's a reason that the banks and insurance companies still use COBOL

Which banks?

The statistics about COBOL where made in 80's and were gathered in institutions and contracting companies in US at that time. Let's suppose that the 95% number was true in *that* context.

Now, move forward 3 decades. Those banks that were operating 30 years ago in US and are still alive very likely still use the old stuff, but this says nothing about all new banks that popped up since then, all new contracting companies that were created since then, and all whole new markets that popped up everywhere in the world, *outside of US*.

Personally, I was involved in three different systems of the "financial" category (one insurance, two trading) and the insurance company was *replacing* their old COBOL system with a new one, while the trading companies are young and do not even have any COBOL stuff to replace. I presume that my experience is not unique.

Today, everybody is blindly repeating the old statistics from that narrow old context like a universal truth. Everybody is sure that finance is done in COBOL, but I've never actually met anybody who has seen a single line of it (that of course does not mean it does not exist - but certainly shows that the market has moved a bit). Today it sounds more like an urban legend than a valid statistics.

That number today might as well be 5% instead of 95%.

> I read somewhere that mainframe sails are essentially constant

You mean - the few old US banks are periodically replacing their aging hardware, but there are no new installations and that's why the sales are constant? Sounds very reasonable.
Then it's rather 5% today.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com