Eric M Russell (2/22/2013)

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Michael Valentine Jones (2/22/2013)

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I don’t see how this list could be complete without mentioning COBOL.

From the 1960s until about 1990 it was the language of choice for business programming with implementations on every major OS.

There are tremendous number of applications written in COBOL still running.

It might not be flashy, sexy, object-oriented, etc. but it continues to be a workhorse.

COBOL can use indexed sequential files, but it still only does row by row cursor style batch processing. I guess it's a work horse on a big mainframe. When I attended university back in late 80's and early 90's, the database related courses were centered around COBOL. However, since then I've never been exposed to COBOL professionally except as part of a Y2K conversion where I had to port an AS400 based inventory system to SQL Server, copying tables and re-writing COBOL procedures as T-SQL. So I know how to read COBOL, but fortunately never had to develop with it.