There is good reason for businesses to worry about the languages their IT systems use. Older languages, such as Cobol, are still heavily in use in vital applications, yet the number of programmers able to work in these "legacy languages" is shrinking rapidly.

Anyone with only a passing interest in the arcane world of Cobol and other legacy languages could be forgiven for thinking they had been largely replaced in the lead-up to 2000 as part of the "Y2K" panic.