Something I wish everyone understood about COBOL is…
- Though developed in 1959, COBOL remains the backbone of numerous mission-critical systems. It provides a level of operational stability that’s difficult – if not impossible – to match with newer, less mature technologies.
- The COBOL language is optimized for business data processing tasks, such as handling large volumes of transactions and files. Organizations in finance, insurance, healthcare, Government, retail, and other sectors rely on applications written in COBOL to manage millions of transactions daily without performance degradation.
- Modernization of COBOL applications is real, and many organizations are successfully on the path to modernizing their COBOL applications. COBOL applications can now interface with modern applications and technologies. The evolution of the language syntax over the years makes it easy for businesses to leverage existing COBOL code to integrate with new systems.
- There is a lot of talk about a COBOL skills shortage, but with its English-like syntax, it is one of the easiest languages to learn. Based on several discussions with new developers, the core issue is not the COBOL language itself but wrapping their heads around the mainframe ecosystem, include runtimes, schedulers, etc., and, importantly, understanding the complex application structure itself.
Venkat Balabhadrapatruni is aDistinguished Engineer and Solutions Architect at Broadcom and a 2024 Planet Mainframe Influential Mainframer.
COBOL designed decimal fields to allow financial accounting with large numbers to the last decimal point. IBM implemented in hardware instructions these numbers in S/360 in 1964, giving it a great advantage in processing speed. S/360 also follows a record oriented file system, allowing I/O to proceed with entire blocks of records, vs examining each byte of data for record terminators.