Power Programming Point: Is Mainframe Cobol still dying?

I have been working in the IT field, with COBOL, for more than ten years and since I started Cobol's death is being declared.

It was my first year in University, I remember the professor saying, "Cobol is a third-generation programming language which is dying. New, more advanced languages will eventually take its place." Two years later, everyone started worrying about the Y2K, and many people realized that there were still billions of lines of code in COBOL and billions were added every year.

In 1996, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL. A Computerworld survey, involving IT managers, done last year found out that 62% of them are using COBOL.

Among the reasons for COBOL to be alive are the costs to substitute it and the risks involved as many back-end processes have years of accumulated business rules implemented by programmers or even analysts who are no longer working at the company.

Some companies are gradually substituting COBOL for other languages while others are no longer developing new applications using it. The reasons to move away from COBOL are usually one of these three:

1. reduce cost of ownership;
2. address the alleged COBOL skills deficit;
3. or the mistaken idea that it will make the business more agile.
   

On the other hand, there are still many companies who recognize the robustness, reliability and simplicity of COBOL as well as its capacity to be integrated with more modern languages like Java. I have worked in systems running COBOL, CICS and DB2 in the back-end and Java in the middle tier making it possible to use any kind of front-end as long as it can communicate with Java.

I do not believe COBOL will die in the near future. It is a reliable, simple and robust language that can be easily taught and used. The fact that it can be integrated with another languages give it more portability and open a wide range of possibilities like a fancy system, with a beautiful front-end and a fast, reliable tool working in the back-end to hand in the information.

Power Programming Point