The Strengths of COBOL

COBOL is still used today by over 60% of organizations around the world

Lying deep at the heart of those of organisations – corporate and governmental - are vital systems written in COBOL. Many of these applications have evolved over decades and have been modified and enhanced many times to meet business or market demands.

In addition, thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have COBOL as the backbone of their packaged business applications for accounting, insurance, banking, ERP etc.

Many of these COBOL applications have also been moved to more contemporary platforms like Windows, UNIX or Linux as these servers have matured.

COBOL applications still run the majority of the world’s business transactions

Over the years COBOL has evolved dramatically, this in part has led to COBOL being the most pervasive language in business. Today:

• The majority of business applications are still written in COBOL, not C or Java
• COBOL applications still process 75% of the worlds business data
• Estimates suggest that in excess of 200 billion lines of COBOL still exist today
• Gartner has estimated that between 2001 and 2005, 15% of all new application functionality and application maintenance would be carried out in COBOL – this equated to 5 billion lines of new COBOL being developed per annum during this period
• A recent (2006) Computerworld Survey of 352 Companies found that 62 percent said they still use COBOL -- and 75 percent of that 62 percent said they use it "a lot." Moreover, 58 percent said they are using it for new application development.       

COBOL has evolved over decades and continues to evolve to stay contemporary and ‘Fit for Purpose’

COBOL is an acronym for Common Business Oriented Language as it was specifically designed for developing on-line and batch data processing business applications, while FORTRAN, JAVA and C were designed for other specific purposes.

One of COBOL’s key strengths is that it was designed to be English like and self documenting so new programmers could understand the processes the programs were created to automate.

Nowadays, the COBOL program source code is typically the only real up to date documentation of the business processes - a key benefit that disappears if the COBOL programs are re-written in any other language.

Although COBOL was designed in 1959 to be "fit for purpose" (business application development), it would not be the backbone of businesses processing if it had not evolved to continue to meet and exceed the expectations of business users. There are therefore many reasons COBOL is still prevalent today

• The COBOL language is easy to learn and easy to write. Any competent programmer trained in any development language can teach themselves COBOL and be productive in weeks
• COBOL is optimised for business transaction and record processing, so it is very fast and even faster when run on the high performance processors available on today’s popular Windows, UNIX and Linux severs.   
• COBOL has always been and still is a standards based language that has continually evolved to incorporate modern programming constructs and technology innovations      

• As the market leading COBOL provider, Micro Focus also introduces many new capabilities, in advance of the COBOL standard, to meet customer demand and provide integration with contemporary technologies, for example      

COBOL development environments offer all the capabilities of C or Java environments

Many of the negative perceptions about COBOL stem from people in organizations who

• Developed applications in the COBOL of the 70’s
• Used green screen or command line development and testing tools on the mainframe
• Suffered from the lack of responsiveness of the mainframe when production systems were utilizing the majority of the mainframe MIPS         

As discussed above, the COBOL language has come a long way since then but in parallel, so has the development tooling that surrounds the language.

Since its inception in 1976, Micro Focus has not just implemented improvements to the COBOL language, as defined by the ANSI standards committee, but led the industry in 

• delivering COBOL on all new microprocessors and operating systems
• introducing Integrated Development Environments (IDE) for COBOL developers
• providing the capabilities to integrate COBOL applications with contemporary technologies 

This innovation in COBOL has enabled us to lead the market and deliver the capabilities our customer’s need, often in advance of them becoming accepted as de-facto standards

The result is that COBOL developers have been able to enjoy working in contemporary IDEs for over 20 years and Micro Focus continues to evolve these IDEs to ensure they deliver all the capabilities enjoyed by programmers using other languages. In addition Micro Focus provides capabilities to help COBOL programmers integrate with modern technologies while hiding the underlying complexities. 

The Micro Focus COBOL IDE therefore provides all the capabilities of the other market leading IDEs for newer languages like C# and Java including:

• integrated COBOL sensitive editor including intellisense
• visual debugging, remote debugging and dynamic debugging capabilities
• project source and build intelligence
• wizards for generating SQL to access any RDBMS 
• graphical tools to expose COBOL programs to SOA  
• generation of non COBOL infrastructure code like WSDL when creating COBOL Web services
• tight integration into a single highly productive development environment.  

This ensures the COBOL programmers can focus on delivering updates to the business processes because they are uniquely qualified to do so as they also possess a deep understanding of the business the application is supporting - a vital attribute which is often underrated.

COBOL and COBOL developers are sometimes ridiculed as ‘Dinosaurs’ – but a fairer analogy (first coined by Peter Coffee, a journalist from Ziff Davis in the USA) would be to ‘Sharks’. Sharks have been around for a long time but rather than becoming extinct they have evolved to become masters of their evolutionary niche and environment and still perform fearsomely well today.