COBOL: WHEN 65 CONTINUE
Proponents of the longstanding programming language, including Reg Harbeck, Misty Decker, Derek Britton and more, reflect on its monumental impact
Quietly running the world's economy, the COBOL computer language has defied all predictions to reach the milestone of 65 years in active duty. Tapping into the thoughts of industry practitioners, end users and technology experts, let’s look at the enduring success of the language and the challenges COBOL must overcome to survive into the future.
Surveys Dispel the Myth of COBOL’s Demise
A couple of years ago, market surveys, arranged separately by the Open Mainframe Project and vendor Micro Focus, served to reset any misunderstanding about the COBOL language. The nagging concern was that COBOL usage was on the wane, its popularity dwindling in the shadow of newer languages and application delivery methods. The statistics rejected that thesis—COBOL was seen to have grown, not diminished, in the decades since the last market size estimate was made. The Open Mainframe Project’s survey results showed COBOL’s total global production to be an estimated 250 billion lines.
This underscored the proponents’ viewpoint that COBOL remains a steadfast, smart choice for enterprise computing due to its business centricity, ease of maintenance, high performance, portability and adaptability. Six decades of value cannot lie, so the story goes. However, it is helpful to keep in mind the adage, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.” In other words, understanding the true state of things can require us to look beyond the surface-level numbers.
COBOL Users Weigh In
So, as we head toward yet another staggering milestone, COBOL’s 65th birthday, we wanted to supplement our fact-based discussion with insight that matters most: the viewpoints of everyday COBOL users—the customers, consultants and technical experts. This was the nucleus of the COBOL 65 Guest Book. Collated and curated by members of the Open Mainframe Project COBOL Working Group, the Guest Book project gave COBOL users the opportunity to reflect on the language’s rich history and integral role in global commerce.
The participants’ comments, broken down by theme, are shared here:
COBOL’s Groundbreaking Origins
Derek Britton, Co-chair of the Open Mainframe Project COBOL Working Group and Modernization Consultant and Commentator
“Built thanks to the brilliance of Grace Hopper, Mary K. Hawes and Jean Sammet, COBOL was the original open-source project—a meeting of minds to solve an industry puzzle. Since the idea took form in 1959, COBOL quietly grew to be a powerhouse of industrial-scale computing, such that it would be hard to imagine the global economy functioning the same without it.”
Misty Decker, Co-chair of the Modernization Working Group, Open Mainframe Project, and Modernization Practice Lead, Kyndryl
"I think of COBOL as the first open-source programming language since it was developed by the CODASYL consortium with contributors from all across the IT industry, including some legendary female innovators. It is truly a programming language created by the people, for the people. Grace Hopper insisted it be easily understood by any English speaker, making programming accessible to the entire business world and not just those who studied it in university.”
An Indispensable Technology
Cameron Seay, Professor at East Carolina State University and Co-chair of the Open Mainframe Project COBOL Working Group
“COBOL is a simple language. The more I learn about it, the more I fall in love with the simplicity of it. It really doesn't matter how you feel about COBOL. It just is and it's going to keep doing what it does. It is relentless.”
Reg Harbeck, Technology Consultant and Committee Member of the Open Mainframe Project COBOL Working Group
“Not only has no other programming language come along that handled the basics of business noticeably better, and not only has COBOL, and the platforms where it shines, continued to greatly improve, but the hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code that run the world economy have an insuperable inertia because, well, they work.”
Philip Teplitzky, Former CIO and CTO of Major U.S. Banking Organizations
"The second most valuable asset in the United States—after oil—is hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL."
Hasnain Attarwala, z/OS Systems Programmer and IBM Z Champion
“As a millennial, I see COBOL's value extending beyond its technical reliability; it sustains countless jobs and is vital to our society's functioning. COBOL powers the systems that handle banking transactions, healthcare data and government services, supporting the backbone of our economy.”
COBOL: The Next Generation
Magie Hall, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis, University of Nebraska
“COBOL presents an opportunity for educators and students alike because it remains in high demand and is commercially vital while remaining largely overlooked. Students are excited when they learn that COBOL is the powerhouse behind some of the most innovative technologies in the world, and it is a language that is relatively easy to learn with a strong career demand.”
Mark Wilson, GSE UK Region Manager and Mainframe Expert
"65 years of COBOL: A testament to timeless reliability, powering the world's most critical systems with unwavering precision. Here's to a legacy that continues to drive the future of business technology."
Derek Britton
“Thanks to its simplicity, business suitability and portability, [COBOL] achieved all this without fanfare and fuss and continues to underpin big business today. The lack of attention to COBOL’s quiet success means many don’t appreciate its profound continued importance—creating a risk for the future of many of today’s vital IT systems. Yet the answer is simple: education and awareness. It’s time to remind ourselves that COBOL means business, now and forever.”
Hasnain Attarwala
“Understanding and maintaining COBOL isn't just about preserving old code; it's about safeguarding the systems that millions of people rely on daily in a digital age where reliability matters!”
Reg Harbeck
“65 years later, the language that took on the mantle of automating the processes that run the world economy—COBOL—is going so strong that it doesn’t even make a hum, let alone a squeak, as it quietly continues doing the business that it inherited from millennia of business best practices. … There is literally no business case to displace or replace it, let alone any pretender to that role that is demonstrably better in the essential ways that we rely on COBOL to keep things silently running along. Not to mention the significant cost of rewriting and testing and converting to anything else that has as its only value proposition the unproven trait of novelty.”
Misty Decker
“The no-code/low-code movement is building on the democratization of application development started by COBOL. Even today, I meet young people who have never programmed a line of code in their life starting their COBOL careers with just a few weeks of training. I attribute this accessibility as a large part of why COBOL has been so pervasive. Long live COBOL! Power to the people!"
COBOL and Modernization
You’ll notice a lot of positive sentiment in the quotes. And that’s for a good reason—this is a list of supporters. Can we assume, therefore, that everything is fine in COBOLville, and that there are no issues? Far from it. COBOL in 2024 and beyond faces pressures that its 1959 designers could hardly have dreamt about. But they are real enough today. They include:
- Who is going to keep it going? While many organizations have solid training programs and some universities continue to teach COBOL, they are the exception rather than the rule. Finding and training technical talent to be the next generation of COBOLersremains a fundamental resourcing concern for organizations. Some have solved that already, but many are still facing this as a major hurdle.
- Where are our systems running now? COBOL also faces the challenge of being associated with the mainframe world. In some situations, the mainframe itself is under attack as organizations flirt with a cloud-centric computing model. Whether that makes sense longer term, it could spell danger for the COBOL applications which—while they work just fine in other environments—may be subject to removal or reengineering as part of a major modernization program.
- Where do we even start? COBOL suffers the notoriety of being verbose and having monolithic applications. Little design finesse and decades of poorly documented change resulted in so-called easy-to-understand code being a highly complex maintenance challenge. In reality, any code base over a million lines or so, regardless of language, will be almost impossible to figure out by simply looking at it. COBOL apps need smart tools to help understand and evolve them. And of course, such tools (often AI-infused) already exist.
Despite COBOL’s success, it has often been taken for granted, overlooked and uncelebrated. Without an overt appreciation of its value in some organizations, funding dried up, as did staffing. Many challenges affecting COBOL suggest a root cause of a lack of appropriate investment. The fix for any of the above is just about smarter planning, sensible resourcing and appropriate technology. None of this is insurmountable by any means.
A Community Commentary
Famously, nobody owns COBOL, since it originated with the CODASYL committee as, to a great extent, the original open-source project. It is therefore heartening that today’s Open Mainframe Project—the de-facto protector of faith in the mainframe ecosystem—boasts a multifaceted approach in support of the COBOL language. While the COBOL Working Group provides commentary and cheerleading for the language, the COBOL Programming Course is an open-source initiative that offers educational COBOL materials and hands-on experience with modern tooling. Further, COBOL Check is a unit testing framework for COBOL created to help COBOL programmers who have difficulties with contemporary development methods such as test driven development. The community continues to invest in, and volunteer to support, COBOL-related initiatives.
Fittingly, thefinal comment from the COBOL 65 Guest Book comes from a veteran of the industry and arguably one of its most informed, experienced voices. Len Santalucia is the Converge Technology Mainframe CTO and chairperson of the Linux Foundation Open Mainframe Project Governing Board. “This year,” Santalucia wrote, “I will be celebrating 51 years in the mainframe business. During my tenure, I have not found any language as efficient as COBOL for business applications. With my focus on financial firms, I see them trying to replace COBOL applications only to find themselves using more expensive alternatives and failing miserably from a business, technical and financial perspective.”
As attempts to replace COBOL fall short, the industry needs an infusion of professionals who can work with the language, Santalucia explained. “The problem with COBOL is that the industry has not created enough new COBOL developers, but that is rapidly changing,” he wrote. “The Open Mainframe Project has found over 1,000 COBOL-skilled resources worldwide available for hire, and professors are teaching COBOL again. Also, the various analysis technologies available on the market can assist any organization to quickly and easily modernize COBOL applications perfectly.”
Continuing on the topic of modernization, Santalucia warned against replacing COBOL with imitators. “My advice to everyone is to value the COBOL applications and mainframe systems you are fortunate to possess and not be so anxious to replace them with alternatives claiming to be just as good or just like them. If you become ill, do you go to someone that is like a doctor, or who really is a doctor? Think about it.”
If you are evaluating the future of COBOL for yourself, please note the title of this article—WHEN 65 CONTINUE—is, as I’m sure you know, valid COBOL syntax.