COBOL PART 3: The Experts’ View

As COBOL reaches 65 years of loyal service in the IT world, this third piece in a four-part homage how a veteran IT technology has remained successful for so long.

We previously introduced some of the reasons behind COBOL’s enduring success as a business language.

Yet this achievement counts for nothing if COBOL fails to win over the hearts and minds of the most important arbiters – the people who might use it every day. So we set out to qualify the sentiment from those closest to the day-to-day use of the language.

Experts in their field – people who build, operate, evolve, and modernize these core COBOL systems – generously shared their opinions on the language and the secret of its success as part of the research for this article. 

Responses generally fell into four broad categories: syntactical simplicity, availability anywhere, endless evolution, and built for business.

Let’s explore each. 

Syntactical Simplicity

COBOL’s syntax is famously readable, resembling English language sentences. This makes it far easier to comprehend than the mnemonics of Assembler it was aiming to displace, and a distant cry from the later hieroglyphic symbolism adopted by the C family of languages, for instance. The premise was simple: the easier it is to read, the easier it is to learn, and maintain.

“COBOL is so easy to understand, I could teach it to you in an afternoon.” Tom Harper, Product Developer

That premise succeeded. Renowned z/OS product developer, Tom Harper, confidently claimed, “COBOL is so easy to understand, I could teach it to you in an afternoon.”

In talking about their own experience in learning the language, Ed Jaffe, CTO at Phoenix International, confessed, “The real heroes were the COBOL language designers who had enabled my lightning-fast understanding of COBOL with no prior programming experience.”

A recent member of the COBOL community, Maria Skyttberg, Systems Developer at CGI Sweden, offered this personal perspective, “I had never written a single line of code in my entire life before starting my journey from preschool teacher to … COBOL developer at the core of a payroll system. I’m proud to be a member of the COBOL family and … widen my network and inspire other people that it is possible to change direction, if wanted, with this non-complex language”.

Kyndryl’s Misty Decker summed up the readability attribute like this:

“It is truly a programming language created by the people, for the people. Grace Hopper insisted it be easily understood by any English speaker, making programming accessible to the entire business world and not just those who studied it in university… even today, I meet young people who have never programmed a line of code in their life starting their COBOL careers with just a few weeks of training.” 

Finally, Magie Hall, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis, University of Nebraska, provides this perspective, “COBOL presents an opportunity for educators and students alike because it remains in high demand and is commercially vital. Students are excited when they learn that COBOL is the powerhouse behind some of the most innovative technologies in the world, and it is a language that is relatively easy to learn with a strong career demand.”

“Students are excited when they learn that COBOL is the powerhouse behind some of the most innovative technologies in the world.” Magie Hall, Associate Professor, University of Nebraska

Availability Anywhere

COBOL’s creation and first release predate the first IBM mainframe, which was not for another four years. The world of IT was in its infancy, and there was no dominant machinery yet.

COBOL’s designers sensibly realized that the language would need to work wherever the emerging market demanded it. And so was born COBOL’s often-overlooked portability, running on all manner of mainframes, which at the time meant Mid-Range systems including AS/400, AIX; and all other major UNIX variants; Linux, Windows, and Cloud.

The COBOL compiler vendor, Micro Focus, once claimed that “hundreds of platforms” can run COBOL. Widespread portability sowed the seeds of adoption, and COBOL became the business language of choice across the leading platforms of the late 1960s onwards.

This all came due to COBOL’s original specification’s requirement for the language to be “machine independent.” The first proof of this, in 1960, happened when COBOL code produced the same results across both Univac and RCA machinery. 

Modernization expert Craig Marble summarized it as, “Modern day COBOL operates efficiently and effectively on virtually any modern operating environment and within literally any Cloud Service Provider.”

Hal Peters at Pinebrook Consulting concurs, “I have worked, and continue to work, in both the mainframe world and the distributed world, continually leveraging previous skills. COBOL allows me to do that.”

Endless Evolution

Similarly, no one in the early 1960’s could reasonably predict the meteoric change in the world of technology that lay ahead of COBOL. Its designers insisted that it could – and should – adapt and change with the times. This came about not only in the language syntax itself (the standards body ANSI, and later ISO, presided over several iterative updates of the COBOL standard), but also in terms of the 3^rd party integration and support added to COBOL environments by the vendors. 

Nowadays, deploying COBOL into the Cloud, as a container, editing it in VSCode, accessing relational data, providing a modern GUI interface, and a thousand other contemporary capabilities are all rudimentary, out-of-the-box functionality for COBOL, just as it is for other languages.

“In today’s world of computing, COBOL utilizes modern development processes and environments, and happily integrates with other cutting-edge platforms technologies,” explained Mike Madden, Owner at Legacy IT. “It’s as modern as everything else.” Hal Peters, Principal at Pinebrook Consulting, echoed the same sentiment, “From architecting and performing migrations, to modernizations and upgrades, [COBOL] is the only coding language that continues to stay modern.”

Russell Hollick, Chief Software Architect at SYSPRO Central, added: 

“Modern COBOL has allowed us to re-use our existing code base and modernize it, which is really exciting for our developers. We’ve been able to move to the Cloud and take advantage of improved IDE as well as Agile and DevOps practices. This new approach has enabled us to bring product to market faster and respond to customers sooner. COBOL and application modernization are a fundamental part of our company’s future and we’re very proud to be part of that journey.” 

Built for Business

COBOL began as a business-level language to enable the growth of the embryonic technology industry, and to train non-technical people how to use it. Designed with business in mind, COBOL manages large volumes of structured data, and the associated complex calculations against it, making it ideal for large-scale commerce for critical industries. Its business-centric attributes include:

• A type-rich language syntax that allows highly accurate data description, with explicit scope and limits, reducing the risk of accidental error.
• Phenomenal arithmetic accuracy of up to thirty-eight decimal digits
• A dedicated, built-in support for data handling and various data formats, including a blisteringly quick SORT facility, built into the syntax of the language.

Commentary regarding COBOL’s commercial viability is abundant. Mike Madden of Legacy IT said, “Many critical IT systems, covering billions of lines of code and across many industries, dating back as far as the sixties, rely on the power and stability of COBOL.”

Erik Weyler and Mats Nordkvist of SEB confirmed, adding, “We have been counting on COBOL since 1970. We currently have more than 125 million lines of active COBOL code running in production.” 

“It’s a testament to the structure and reliability of the language that it is still thriving and running critical infrastructure businesses to this day,” shared Dustin Koppit, Mainframe Engineering at Union Pacific Railroad. “[COBOL has] been critical to the railroad for over 50 years and is still running apps that move people and trains.”

“The second most valuable asset in the United States – after oil – is hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL.” Philip Teplitsky

Hector Rivera, Vice President at Fiserv Technology Services, commented, “With COBOL, there is a large footprint of reliance in the Financial, Insurance and Government spaces. It is hard to argue with the value COBOL represents in reliability, performance, maintainability.” 

Former CTO/CIO, Phil Teplitsky, was unequivocal, “The second most valuable asset in the United States – after oil – is hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL.”

An Accident of History?

So far, we have told a story about a computer language that has its challenges but is popular with its practitioners and has many positive attributes.

To be completely fair, that’s not the whole story. From its inception, COBOL had its critics. An anonymous quote in June 1960 predicted that COBOL would not last to the end of that decade—quite scathing, given the first release of the working compiler was not until later that year. Since then, either despite or because of its growing ubiquity in the marketplace (by 1970, it was the most widely used computer language in government and commerce), COBOL has occasionally come under fire.

The Year 2000 (“Y2K”) bug became a huge issue in the late 1990’s. The concern was about an efficiency in data storage in COBOL systems. Fears of likely outages of apocalyptic proportions filled the press, as a whole raft of solutions to ‘fix the Y2K bug’ came into being. In the end, nothing failed. The fix was simple. Storage constraints in early mainframe hardware was the underlying issue, and some COBOL programs had taken some risky shortcuts. The situation sowed the seeds of doubt about COBOL’s suitability.

A generation later, during the COVID era, COBOL got the blame for being the reason why a state government couldn’t process unemployment claims fast enough. The truth behind the story was simply a resourcing challenge and a question mark over the scalability of a web site; nothing to do with COBOL.

Regardless, you do not have to look too hard to find disparaging comments about the language. In the non-COBOL and non-mainframe communities, the language has notoriety. Charmingly antiquated at best, critics deride the verbosity of the syntax, the forced structuring of the sections in a program, even the historical use of upper-case characters. To a trained computer scientist, COBOL looks like a bygone technology from a bygone era. There is no finesse, no creative aspect.

Importantly, COBOL’s English-like syntax and structuring of the program was a result of the design policy, driven by the necessity to train non-computer-literate professionals (there was no such thing as a computing qualification back then) to use the computer. COBOL’s design criteria meant anyone (and we mean anyone, not any computer major) could learn it, read it, and then code it. To ignore the design principle misses the point entirely of how COBOL became, and stayed, so widespread.

Don Estes, Senior Principal at Maven-Wave – an Eviden Company, suggested that COBOL’s success was due to historical chance. “It’s not the computer science attributes of the language itself, but it’s the accident of history,” in that its age of introduction gave it a free run in the market for years. While true to an extent, all monopolies face challengers, and COBOL had rivals for at least the last five decades. The accident explains the introduction, not the resilience.

In next week’s final article of this four-part homage to COBOL, we will examine its likely future, and some of the major challenges and opportunities it faces.

Don’t miss COBOL parts one and two:
Part 1: Information Technology: IT’s Key Ingredients
Part 2: COBOL – Thriving to Survive

To read more from COBOL experts, check out Britton’s COBOL 65 Guest Book.