COBOL has come a long way from the old misconception of its being a monolithic, 1970s mainframe language. Modern COBOL supports all the modern technologies, from Windows GUIs, client/server architecture, XML, and ODBC/relational databases to SOAP/Web Services.   Unlike many other modern languages, however, COBOL is known for its stability, robustness and platform-independence.  COBOL remains the most portable of all languages, ensuring against hardware obsolescence.  Furthermore, COBOL is still the most scalable language, handling large processing volumes with ease.

As a data-centric business language, COBOL is a natural fit for data-rich business applications.  COBOL is simple to use and maintain, resulting in applications with fewer errors.  Perhaps COBOL’s greatest strength, however, is the ease with which it adapts to almost all business-related applications.

Despite its age, COBOL is going strong, while many of its contemporaries, such as Assembler, Pascal, ADA, Fortran, Eiffel, SmallTalk and C, promised a lot but then faded away. COBOL compilers and associated toolsets are still being developed and will continue to embrace future technologies.

COBOL and COBOL developers are sometimes ridiculed as being dinosaurs, but a fairer analogy (first coined by Peter Coffee, a journalist from Ziff Davis in the USA) would be to sharks. Sharks have been around for a long time, but rather than dying out, they have evolved to become masters of their evolutionary niche and environment and still perform fearsomely well today.

Industry analysts agree that COBOL is far from extinction.

According to Forrester Research:

Most major companies are retaining the COBOL legacy

• 25% are extending COBOL applications.
• 5% are writing their first COBOL application.

• Through 2004-2005, 15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) were developed in COBOL.
• 80% of all deployed applications included extensions to existing legacy (usually COBOL) programs.
• COBOL is found in 75% of enterprise business processes, acting as the solid, transaction-focused foundation for the world’s core business processes.

• There are currently 200 billion lines of COBOL code in live applications representing an investment of £2.5 trillion.