Hacker Trends › Cobol trend

How Cobol trended on Hacker News

Cobol was mentioned 15,816 times on Hacker News between 2007 and 2026, peaking in Apr 2020 with 392 that month.

Every month from 2007 to 2026, counting how often Cobol appears in Hacker News stories and comments. Each point is a live date-histogram over ~45M items, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

Top Hacker News stories about Cobol

1. 1.Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer 534 points · 273 comments · 2016 · discuss on HN
2. 2.New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system 447 points · 295 comments · 2020 · discuss on HN
3. 3.Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died 429 points · 105 comments · 2017 · discuss on HN
4. 4.COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it 425 points · 437 comments · 2024 · discuss on HN
5. 5.A Minecraft server written in COBOL 344 points · 121 comments · 2024 · discuss on HN
6. 6.IBM will offer free COBOL training 322 points · 227 comments · 2020 · discuss on HN
7. 7.COBOL programmers answer call 320 points · 238 comments · 2020 · discuss on HN
8. 8.Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20? 277 points · 499 comments · 2025 · discuss on HN
9. 9.Cloudflare Workers now supports COBOL 276 points · 84 comments · 2020 · discuss on HN
10. 10.Ask HN: Career change for elderly UK ex-convict? 267 points · 176 comments · 2022 · discuss on HN
11. 11.Cobol Still Powers the Global Economy 256 points · 192 comments · 2019 · discuss on HN
12. 12.Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on? 245 points · 189 comments · 2025 · discuss on HN

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