I studied COBOL as part of my Computer Science degree. Even at the time, it wasn’t considered a popular programming language, especially compared to newer languages that were gaining traction. But, COBOL was still used in college to teach computer programming concepts such as data handling, data structures, etc. At the time, many students including myself, questioned why we were learning a language that was old and not a pre-requisite in most of the job postings for software engineering positions.
Fast forward to today and at the time I am writing this post, COBOL is still far from obsolete. Despite being more than 60 years old, COBOL remains critical in many industries, particularly in banking, government, and insurance. Many systems in these sectors were built decades ago using COBOL and are still up and running. In many cases, replacing these systems entirely is expensive and time-consuming, which is why organizations continue to use them.
I did some research out of curiosity and was surprised to see that Udemy offers COBOL courses. This was a strong signal that there is ongoing demand for COBOL programming skills. Many of these learners are likely people who are professionals tasked with maintaining and supporting these systems rather than building something in COBOL from scratch. As older COBOL developers retire, there continue being a need for new developers to learn COBOL programming.
COBOL made me think about that some technologies when they are implemented and working well are not always replaced just because new technologies come along.
It is estimated that 220 billion lines of COBOL code are still in production.
Jesús Melendez 