Common Business-oriented Language (COBOL) has a history of half a century plus. It is the backbone of financial and government systems. The active code lines in COBOL are estimated to 220 billion. In fact, it is a legacy programming language. It powers 95 per cent of personal banking activities.
In fact, the new survey in 2022 by Microfocus contends that COBOL footprint has spread over 775-850 billion lines of code, far exceeding the previous estimate of being between 200-300 billion lines.
There are moves to switch over to object-oriented languages such as Java. A good example is the IBM Watson Code Assistant.
AI cannot replace COBOL. It is a flawed idea. AI can write the initial bits of code (division and sections and maybe a para or two). Anything more produced by AI must be vetted by a human being since it has far-reaching implications.
COBOL persists not just because it is a legacy. It has reliability and business criticality. Most of the organizations consider COBOL apps strategic to their operations. COBOL has been integrated to cloud. The financial sector would not like it to go since it processes for them millions of transactions daily.
Organizations would like to revamp their COBOL systems, rather than replacing them. Many companies would like to opt for modernisation of COBOL system. COBOL now adapts to modern computing. It can interact with HTML, JSON, XML and even generative AI. Thus, core COBOL could be retained and new technologies can be leveraged for front-end consumer interface.
COBOL was designed for mainframe computers. These days COBOL has been made available for all the developers, e.g. GnuCOBOL.
COBOL developers earn decent salaries. However, the companies requiring COBOL code are declining. Thus, developers cannot find COBOL work in all geographies. They will have to be near the companies where COBOL is used. COBOL developers should master mainframes. At the same time, they should be in touch with other technologies.
The average salary of a COBOL developer in the USA is $84000 which could rise up to $112,000. The developer should learn the whole stack of legacy systems including COBOL, CICS, DB2, Syncsort, IBM Utilities, Changeman and JCL scripting.
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