COBOL is nearly 60 years old. Jonathan Sayles examines how COBOL is still used today and it is not going anywhere soon. Besides that “As many as 75% of all rewrite projects have resulted in failure” and with the redoubtable Reuters reported that when Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced its core COBOL platform in 2012, it took five years – and cost $749.9 million.
Enterprise Business Applications are large, very large and very, very large. As an example a large American car manufacturer runs 50,000 batch jobs each night. Each job consists of between 5 and 20 steps. Most steps execute a composite load module consisting of 2 to 200 COBOL programs.
COBOL addresses the reality of business application development. COBOL is an English, readable, self-documenting programming language. Maintenance and production support-related tasks benefit, particularly when assigned to developers who were not the original application authors.
Main features and qualities of the COBOL:
- Self-documenting
- Tractable
- Simple
- Lifecycle-Agnostic
- Nonproprietary
- Efficient
- Scalable
- Universal
- Complete
- Mature
COBOL is all about long-term, enterprise computing ROI. Find out more in this excellent article!
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