Sunday 14 March 2010
THE 50 YEAR OLD programming language COBOL is set to make a comeback, according to SD Times.
A survey by Micro Focus claimed that the average American still interacts with a COBOL program 13 times a day. That includes ATM transactions, ticket
purchases and telephone calls.
What has happened is that many COBOL applications have been wrapped with .NET, where it competes better against Windows applications.
Many outfits that are running COBOL software really don’t need to upgrade it, as it works nicely within the new frameworks. There are apparently shedloads of
open sauce compilers that can make COBOL work just fine in Linux environments.
COBOL has been installed in many legacy systems, particularly in the financial markets, and it has remained a steady source of income for aging programmers.
However, the move towards cloud computing also means that COBOL could be with us for another 50 years.
Drake Coker, chief technologist for application development at Micro Focus, said that the future of COBOL may also lie in the cloud. Currently there are web
applications written in COBOL, and there are even graphical applications programmed in COBOL as well.
He said that any significant technology with substantial business value has been layered into the language at some point.
Coker said that he was currently looking at what has to happen to put COBOL applications into the Cloud.
