COBOL: the daddy of them all!

R. Savitha, Pune
The Hindu Business Line
In a study by Gartner in late 2007 on ageing of programming languages, COBOL was classified as being in the ‘Adult’ lifespan phase, reflecting factors such as availability of skills, tools, regular releases, and signs of vibrancy, and stability.

Visual Basic 6, a much younger language than COBOL, was classified as ‘Elderly’, due to its less healthy ‘vital signs’, and Ruby (one of a crop of languages that came to the fore post-Millennium) was classified, like COBOL, an ‘Adult’.

Ashish Masand, Country Manager, Micro Focus India, told Business Line that COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) has been the dominant language for developing business applications since its inception five decades ago.

Systems and applications have remained in widespread use within vertical sectors such as finance, government, manufacturing and telecom.

Recent statistics by IBM reveal that around 200 billion lines of COBOL code are in live operation; 75 percent of the world’s business data, and 90 percent of the financial transactions are processed vide this good old language.

There are 1.5-2 million developers globally, working with COBOL and around five billion lines of new COBOL code are added to live systems every year.

According to Ovum (a research agency based out of England), corporations today have almost $2 trillion worth of mainframe applications, which house approximately 70 percent of their critical business logic and data.

Another research by Forrester states that the COBOL code running core business applications will exceed 200 billion in the next decade, he said.

Masand of Micro Focus said COBOL has, over the years, grown and adapted itself to all the latest technologies. Though originally meant for mainframe developers, the language has come a long way and is also available on Windows, Unix and Linux platforms.

“Today, COBOL applications can be SOA and Web enabled and integrated with applications written in other languages, such as J2EE, JAVA and .NET. It touches everything from personal computers to connected applications and can be used to host applications on the cloud with ease,” he said.

Looking at the main segments which would take on this language, Masand noted that there were 200 times as many COBOL transactions as there were Google searches every day.

“In fact, anyone using their cell phones, ATM and credit cards, or travelling by train will be touched by the language. All these daily transactions use COBOL for their programming needs. Eighty percent of the world’s financial transactions are also done on COBOL and most of the businesses rely on the language to run their mission critical applications,” he added.