COBOL: Is it dying or thriving?
Some say COBOL is a disreputable old language that no one should use any more. Some say COBOL is a national treasure, a language used by upward of two-thirds of those developing and maintaining software. How can both of these statements exist in the same disciplinary field? Why is there such dramatic disagreement about COBOL’s merits? And in particular, what about those new languages that some are saying should replace COBOL for business application work? In other words, what’s with COBOL? That may be one of the most burning questions of the day for those interested in the topic of Information Systems. Practitioners are being urged to abandon COBOL for new developments, especially client/server software, and yet they are flocking to it for the maintenance of legacy systems, especially in the face of the year 2000 problem. IS academics are abandoning COBOL as the primary language for teaching business systems software development, while at the same time keeping their finger in the pie by offering it as an optional course. All of those COBOL questions have intrigued me over the last several years. There’s nothing new about their thrust, of course; people have been predicting the demise of COBOL in favor of some new language just about every decade since the sixties romped into the seventies. But the drum beat seems stronger now, as the turning of the decades evolves into the turning of the millennium. Is COBOL, finally, on its way out? Recently I decided to investigate the drum beat. I began to explore two questions: