COBOL AND MAINFRAME PLATFORMS

Ask any tradesmen about the importance of his or her tools and the answer will be extremely important. Whether you are a plumber, electrician or a mechanic, having the correct tools is of most importance. Some tradesmen have some very old tools that still function today better than any sparkling new ones. These old tools are tried and proven and always perform the way they are supposed to.

Similarly, COBOL, (common business-oriented language) is just that, a tried and proven tool that has been around since 1958. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction jobs. Financial service providers still use COBOL because it’s fast, efficient and resilient. They can still embrace mobile banking, phone apps, and better websites.

Interestingly,COBOL still accounts for more than 70 percent of the business transactions that take place in the world today. To put that into further context, Lero, a software engineering research center, recently announced that even in today’s fast-evolving and innovative society COBOL is still being used more than Google.COBOL is still the main programming language for Mainframes (centralized computing servers). COBOL, in combination with Mainframes, has been the main back-end IT system over the past 5–6 decades for most of the Fortune 500 companies. When you make a financial transaction, it is most probably triggering a program written in COBOL.

Now, COBOL programmers and those who knew it well twenty plus years ago are a dying breed. Some companies are tapping that older generation to come back and consult and offer their knowledge to fix issues or just train others. High wages are gladly paid just to keep the dinosaur moving.Quite a number of companies, government organizations and other institutions still operate, maintain and update their COBOL applications from decades ago. Sometimes simply because they still work and it makes no economic sense to replace them with modern languages. Especially when the toolset of so many providers allows interfacing of COBOL applications with the modern languages.

Lastly, there is an old saying, “if it ain’t broke don't fix it”, this saying applies to COBOL for many industries. Anybody that carries a tool box probably has a tool that is tried and proven for different applications. Surely a screwdriver can't turn a bolt but it can be used to pry something open, poke a hole in a wall and a myriad of other wondrous ways