Donald Burleson Click here for more Oracle News Headlines

COBOL is alive and well in Oracle Shops

COBOL, the Common Business Oriented Language, remains alive and well, decades after predictions of its demise.  This article reports on the popularity of COBOL in large database shops:

“In a Computerworld survey early this year of IT managers at 352 companies, 62% of the respondents reported that they actively use Cobol. Of those, three quarters said they use it “a lot” and 58% said they’re using it to develop new applications.”

For those of you who are not familiar with COBOL, it’s a programming language that you can use with Oracle and the Oracle Pro*COBOL compiler remains widely-used today.  One distinct advantage of COBOL over low-level languages such as C and Java is that it’s actually easy to read:

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“Forrester Research Inc., says companies that are having trouble finding experienced Cobol programmers should hire programmers with other skills — especially business skills and applications knowledge — and train them in Cobol internally.”

COBOL is also object-oriented, supporting encapsulation and inheritance.  This article notes that COBOL remains popular in the world of business applications.

As we enter the second the of mainframe computing (characterized by large monolithic Windows and Linux mainframe-sized servers), we see that the olden-days of MVS mainframes are not going away anytime soon:

“Indeed, Cobol promises to be around for many more years, challenging the IT managers who must support it. “A lot of people have said they were going to get rid of the mainframe, but that hasn’t happened,” says Mark Washik, a consultant at Schneider Electric SA in Palatine, Ill. “And for us, all that code is working. There’s no sense in rewriting it.””

Of course, in 50 years the next generation of programmers will make fun of those old codgers who program in Java struts . . .

BC provides COBOL Consulting Support, Oracle COBOL Contracting, Oracle COBOL Support, COBOL Programming contracting, and COBOL Programming support services.