Cobol and Artificial Intelligence: Can we make a match?

I have always been interested in Artificial Intelligence. I think it is one of the limits to what we can do, yet.

Last night I came across some guidelines to help in creating a Mind using COBOL. I think that the idea behind this site is instigate people, COBOL developer to be more specific, to create a mind using different programming languages. They expect programmers to create the different modules they suggest and integrate them.

I could not find out if someone is trying to do it. If you find out, please tell me, I’m really curious to know the results.

Maybe I will undertake the task.

Related Article

Power Programming Point

How is COBOL today?

I finally came across a fair article about COBOL looking at it from a business point of view instead of a technical one. Many IT theorists have been claiming COBOL's death for decades but I believe that the majority of them look at the language as academics.

As Mr. Abraham points out in his article, “[COBOL] is a basic fact of business life.” It is a fundamental tool for business. Many companies that started decades ago have been using it and now COBOL supports their system. Industries like Bank, Insurance, Credit Cards use it effectively and instead of concentrated on changing it, they are trying to integrate it with new tools to increase its power and capabilities.

Today’s concern about COBOL developers retiring and leaving companies helpless may be linked to a different agenda, trying to promoting another languages. I have worked in Portugal and Brazil and I know that there are many young programmers there and a few universities still teach COBOL. However, the majority of the students are not too interested because their professors allege the language is dying or dead.

Related Article

Power Programming Point

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