Do I even have to argue this? There are countless articles describing the problem that many COBOL developers are retiring and not enough new developers learn COBOL. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 etc. etc. etc. I have seen a few articles that claim otherwise, but such articles are by far the minority. If […]
One of the main arguments for the relevance of COBOL is that it handled „95% of all Creditcard-Swipes“ or „95% of all In-Person Transactions“ or „95% of all ATM Swipes“. This number, like many other numbers, comes from the Gartner survey in 1997. So this number, again, only says that 95%1. of mainframe owners2. who […]
To understand this, you need to know that – in the mainframe world – you don’t have multiple computers with one keyboard and monitor each. You have one central computer (the mainframe), which controls multiple keyboards and monitors (terminals) individually.A CICS transaction is when the mainframe sends or receives data to or from one of […]
In articles about COBOL, you sometimes see a claim that calculations were „more precise“ in COBOL. This might be the most impudent lie you will find around COBOL. Turing Completeness C, C++, C#, Java, Python and almost every other programming language are turing complete. To be turing complete, a programming language only needs to provide […]
Some companies (whom you could consider our competitors – so feel free to take this article with a grain of salt) offer the service of migrating your code to a different platform – some of them into the cloud. So if you accept that offer, then you would still have (nearly) the same code, but […]
COBOL / Mainframes have the reputation of having superior performance – „Workhorse“ is a term often associated with them. The well-known COBOL brain drain survey from 2009 revealed that 87% of COBOL users still believed that COBOL had much better – or at least about the same – performance than other languages. I do believe that […]
I have seen some (not so many) COBOL advocates claiming it was futile to migrate to other languages, because these other languages might one day be obsolete, too – and then you’ll have to migrate again. „They are just moving to the next COBOL“ was a catchy sentence I have read. First of all: this […]
To this day, COBOL advocates claim that there were 200 times more COBOL transactions than google searches per day. Even IBM and microfocus claim this. It makes COBOL sound extremely relevant, but this number doesn’t sound very plausible to me. So I dived into the topic and found some interesting facts that make this number […]
Mainframes / COBOL have the reputation of being stable and secure. The well-known COBOL brain drain survey from 2009 revealed that 77% of COBOL users believed that COBOL had much better – or at least about the same – security than other languages. This presumption probably comes from a time before the internet, when these computers were […]
The Smithsonians National Museum of American History has a page Getting COBOL to Run. Priceless.