What Are Common Applications for Cobol?

1. What are common applications for COBOL?

The COBOL programming language is typically used in large scale databases in banks and insurance companies. Today, COBOL is rarely used to write new software applications. It has been replaced by the C/C++ programming language, but up until the 80’s all business software was written using COBOL. This includes but not exclusively accounting, payroll, and large bank applications. COBOL is still used today due to the high cost in upgrading software, and recent studies show that as many as twelve million COBOL applications are still used today. Also, a good majority of these are proprietary and would be extremely hard to redo in a more current language. So it is obvious that COBOL programs are everywhere, and more importantly our economic system depends on these COBOL applications. Almost all of the economic algorithms have been coded in COBOL, and programmers should not be required to code all of these COBOL applications from scratch. COBOL has proven to be an outstanding language for expressing business rules, manipulating the operational data that businesses depend on, and handling transactions. The subsystems in which a large portion of the world’s COBOL code have proven to be highly reliable, scalable, and responsive. All these characteristics are important components of a successful business operating on the Internet or anywhere else. COBOL will not be the complete solution for everyone, but it is and will continue to be a strong force in business-enterprise development.

2. Why is COBOL still being used?

One of the primary reasons COBOL is still so widely used is the shear amount of code that was written in COBOL in the last 30 years. The amount of money to convert this legacy code to one of today’s modern programming languages would be in the billions of dollars. Businesses have so much money invested in their COBOL programs already, that most can’t or don’t want to start all over again if these systems meet their current needs. Even though better languages have been designed, all the business can’t just discard the legacy code in COBOL, which will cause extra cost and disruption. Over the years, companies have spent billions in developing their computer systems and there is no way they can afford to dump these and start again from scratch. The amount of investment in networking equipment is also the reason I don’t see us switching to IPv6 in the near future. Even though it would solve the problem of running out of IP addresses, the amount of money phone companies and business would have to invest to start from scratch would be too significant to justify the investment. Also, since COBOL is so well put structured, programmers can easily learn a modern language with some brief training. Today, it is estimated that some 70% of all commercial computer applications are written in COBOL.

Another reason that COBOL is still widely used is that it can run on virtually any platform. It can run on UNIX, Windows, or even various types of desktop computers. It has been used in developing business applications for around the last 40 years, so it has proven reliability and stability. Because a majority of this software was written when processors weren’t as powerful and memory was limited, good discipline was exercised when programming these applications. It has been estimated that the industry has invested over $5 trillion in applications written in COBOL. COBOL programmers made very efficient use of the limited computers resources they had available. This code run very fast and could be scaled to any size necessary. COBOL applications are noted for their security and good performance. It is easy to move COBOL application to different machines because the code is so portable between hardware platforms. COBOL’s stability has been enjoyed by users and programmers. Many promising languages were developed during COBOL’s history, but none have proven as stable or secure while providing superior performance. COBOL has survived these new technologies, with core application code and its all-important business rules remaining intact.

COBOL has survived because it is such a portable language, it can easily be moved from old platforms onto the latest computer hardware. There is still a large market for tools to manage existing legacy applications and integrate them into Web services; IBM’s WebSphere is one example

...