COBOL is in the news again. Millions of people are filing unemployment claims nearly all at once, and the systems to process them are failing. Why? They need to scale to unprecedented levels — they’re written in COBOL, and… we don’t have enough COBOL programmers.

Here’s a look at the increase in searches for “COBOL programmers”:

We’ve all seen that the world (well, governments, specifically state governments, to say nothing of the banks) is screaming for COBOL programmers—a cry that goes up roughly every five years. We somehow muddle through the crisis at hand, then people forget that it was ever a problem. It’s time we asked what the crisis really […]

(COmmon Business Oriented Language) World's favorite mainframe programming language. Despite its venerable roots as one of the earliest high-level compiled languages, COBOL today still underpins some of the world's most important commercial and government operations, as it remains the most widely used programming language on mainframe computers. Created in 1959 by a cross-industry group of computer manufacturers under the auspices of the US Department of Defense, COBOL was designed as a machine-independent, industry-standard programming language for business data processing -- although in practice there were various incompatibilities between individual makers' versions. It has continued to evolve under the management of US and international standards bodies. The latest revision is COBOL 2002, with the next planned for 2008.