COBOL's Not Dead

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5 points·solipsist··4 comments

I started at a company 2.5 years ago as a COBOL programmer and am now a Software Architect for the company. I would say that COBOL still runs a very large percentage of business systems (especially banking). Our system does even implement GUI and we are starting to use a form of MVC for new development.

While I think most companies that have COBOL systems want to get rid of them and move to a newer language, doing so is going to take a very long time. My company has wanted to move from COBOL to a higher language for over 5 years now and never been able to prove the business case. The language will be around, at least in maintenance if not development for at least another 20 years imho.

The big problem that companies are having is that the majority of COBOL programmers will retire in the next 5 years and new college grads don't have experience with it and don't want to learn it because it is considered "dead" by mainstream CS. That means those that actually know the language stand to make a very large amount of money in the coming years helping big banks convert their systems, when they have nowhere else to turn.

There's even a little bit of activity on the /r/cobol subreddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/cobol

COBOL is dead. This is just another press release from Micro Focus, a legacy/COBOL vendor. If you're fooled by this, you're not thinking critically.

I think you need to define dead. If you are saying it is dead in the sense that there is no new development being done on it and/or it is not in high use, then you are completely mistaken. I would say the best "dead" definition for it is: any company looking to implement a new system would not choose COBOL as their language. In that sense, it is technically dying, but definitely not dead.

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