I’ve worked as a Cobol programmer for over 20 years and I do not see it going away any time soon.
While there are many efforts of companies to move from Cobol and update their applications, there really aren’t many programming languages which can process huge amounts of data as efficiently.
Cobol is the back-end to many web sites and can crunch the data quite efficiently.
The costs to migrate from Cobol are quite high since 40+ years of business logic would need to be rewritten Many programming languages are great for processing data, but not necessarily generating reports. Other languages are great at designing and generating reports, but lack in processing data. While Cobol might not be a “pretty” language it is very easy to write business logic into code.
While you won’t see many, if any games or photo processing apps written in Cobol, you will see many banking and insurance systems written with Cobol behind the web page or GUI front-end.
Cobol was designed for businesses. It’s really Cobol’s middle name – Common Business Oriented Language.
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