Quick, learn some Cobol!

I got to learn some Fortran and BASIC in my days, but was never brave enough to tackle Cobol. Looks like it might be my next thing to learn for job-security ;) Per this article from Dr. Dobb's Portal (via Slashdot), come these really interesting nuggets - 

Cobol: 1) is the most widely used language in the 21st century; 2) is critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today; and 3) may be the next language you'll be learning?


In 1997 the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps. Something like 90 percent of financial transactions are processed by Cobol code, and 75 percent of all business data processing is Cobol. Merril Lynch reports that 70 percent of its business runs on Cobol apps.

More interesting and possibly horrifying information (if you are like me and not really looking forward to programmingin COBOL for the rest of your life) at the link...