Last night I met somebody who works for a bank system provider that now accounts for approx 70% of the world's bank systems. It has been popular to say that most banks use COBOL but in fact they use RPG that dates back to the 1960s and offers loop constructs designed for punched-card programs. You'll struggle to find vendor-anointed gurus in contemporary circles who would agree that RPG is a useful player in 2011, but that doesn't stop the banks or highly-incentivized employees who understand all the arguments about technology and latest tools etc but also understand fully why maintaining existing investment makes sense if you can do it. Some can't do it, and that's a shame. Others can do it, and some of them wonder why the other camp is proud of serial wastage of human time and investment. In contemporary systems this seems to be dividing into a proprietary VS open source behavior pattern, with the open source ants increasing scathing about the proprietary grasshoppers.