Subject: Portion of Programmers of In-house Code out of the Total

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 15:25:44 +0200 (IST)

In the Magic Cauldron:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html

Eric Raymond notes that:

<<<
but we'll see shortly that there is empirical
evidence that approximately 95% of code is still written in-house.

This code includes most of the stuff of MIS, the financial- and
database-software customizations every medium and large company needs. It
includes technical-specialist code like device drivers. Almost nobody
makes money selling device drivers, a point we'll return to later. It
includes all kinds of embedded code for our increasingly microchip-driven
machines - from machine tools and jet airliners to cars to microwave ovens
and toasters.

Now, my question is: what percentage of the programmers actually work on
shrinkwrap code, i.e: code that can be sold in the marketplace? (including
open source one)

Someone asked it on the IRC, and all I could give as evidence was this
page, as well as my intuition, and an older post by Oleg that said that
there was more code written in COBOL in Israel than all other languages
combined. Can anyone give evidence into how many programmers fall into each
category (or "world" as Joel Spolsky put it) of software construction?

I know part of the problem is that shrinkwrap software is the most
visible. We often hear about Microsoft's products, CA, Borland, as well as
many open source projects. In Israel, the most visible companies are
Check-Point, Mercury, and so forth. But there is a lot of in-house code
behind the scenes, and quite a lot.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

My opinions may seem crazy, but they all make sense. Insane sense, but
sense nonetheless.

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Feb 2003 16:57:57 +0200

Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]> writes:

> combined. 

I never said that ;-)

I actually read several times that more code is written in COBOL than
in any other language. I don't know if it refers to the US or to the
world at large, but Israel was never a part of it. It was also some
years ago, maybe the winner now is Visual Basic or Java or whatever.

I don't remember where I read this either.

> visible. 

Consider the following: in your everyday life the vast majority of s/w
is not shrinkwrapped. You only use shrikwrapped s/w on your desktop
computer. All of the other electronic equipment, from your stereo to
your answering machine to your cell phone to the elevator controller
to the couple of dozen different chips in your car (assuming it is
fairly modern) runs software, but not something you can buy in a box
(assuming this is what you mean by "shrinkwrapped").  All the services
that we take for granted, such as electricity, telephone,
transportation, aircraft, space shuttle, atomic power plants -
everything uses software. Most of it is in-house software. Some of it
is contracted, but hardly anything is generally available.

There you go. An awful lot of people contributed to development of all
that code, and wrote even more code to aid them in development. Even
more people wrote the software that computes their payroll, taxes,
prints payslips, wires money into their bank accounts and to their
insurance companies, helps the banks' back offices to hedge their
mortgages, etc.

None of that fails under what is conventionally called "shrinkwrapped"
software. Most of that is developed in-house. Much of the admin and
financial stuff is based on legacy systems written in COBOL, and
features are added to those all the time because they are needed,
because tax codes change, because the mark and the frank no longer
exist, et caetera, et caetera.

I have no hard numbers on all of that, but it seems to me that
learning MFC would be rather limiting as far as programming career
opportunities go... There I slipped into Microsoft-bashing
again... ;-)

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked]

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 08:12:13 +0200 (IST)

> I don't remember where I read this either.

I am referring to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hackers-il/message/1883

Maybe I misinterpreted you to believe that it referred to Israel alone. In
that case: sorry. And it seems that it just says that the largest part is
COBOL, not that it is over 50% of the code.

 > > I know part of the problem is that shrinkwrap software is the
most > > visible.
> computer.
> [explanation snipped...]

Oleg, I realize you are correct in this analysis. However, I need some
hard facts as well. Can anyone give me some statistics?

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Feb 2003 08:41:08 +0200

Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]> writes:

> Maybe I misinterpreted you to believe that it referred to Israel
> alone. 

You did. Israel is not mentioned there.

> In that case: sorry.

Apology accepted ;-). However, you did something else that is - :) -
inexusable: you did not look through the thread to find your own
posting with Larry Wall's http://www.perl.com/1999/08/onion/talk.html
where he refers to a study of demand for various programming languages
(and says he does not believe the study). Unfortunately, it seems that
the links to the study and its author are unavailable.