Derek Britton is one of COBOL’s biggest advocates, a one-man PR agency for the 65-year-old language that “suffers from an existential challenge.” We caught up with him at SHARE Kansas City to talk COBOL, AI, and the future of mainframes.

From his perspective, COBOL is arguably the original GOAT (greatest of all time). Britton is quick to point out that all the things we associate with nonmainframe technology innovation—programming language choices, security, containerization, DevOps— are equally available in the mainframe world. COBOL accounts for a far greater level of economic importance than it gets credit for.

Part of COBOL’s reputation challenge is that from the outside, it looks stuck like a glacier. Even though on the inside, the past 30 years have brought tremendous change. Britton remarks that the ‘uncool’ factor of COBOL would be true of any language built by someone in another era.

Why not translate it, then, if fewer people know COBOL and have the skills for upkeep?

Britton says, “It doesn’t really solve anything since all you’ll have is another equally vast and incomprehensible application. And, COBOL is at least easy to read; most other programming languages are based on hieroglyphics. Translating COBOL isn’t necessarily an advantage since a million lines of code in any language is intimidating.”

Weighing in on AI, Britton thinks the jury is still out on precisely how — and how deep — GenAI, AI, and the concepts of AI will benefit the business community. There may be individual use cases or specific issues AI can tackle, but he predicts AI will “be sprinkled on top” of technology to accelerate ongoing work. Businesses are going to have to be very specific about how AI will help them.

Will the mainframe become just another swim lane for IT delivery? Would that be a good thing?

Watch this 21-minute video and weigh in.

Read more from Derek Britton on COBOL.

Penney Berryman, MPH (she/her), is the Content Editor for Planet Mainframe. She also writes health technology and online education marketing materials. Penney is based in Austin, Texas.

Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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