COBOL

By Rhonda Wright
COBOL

Common Business Oriented

Language
Outline of Presentation
History
Strengths and Weaknesses
Facts
Evaluation
History of COBOL

Developed by the CODASYL

Committee
Business applications
Coding Forms
COBOL Design
Punched onto punch
cards
loaded into the
computer using punch
card reader
Strengths of COBOL
COBOL is in wide use
English-like and self-documenting
promotes code writing discipline
inherently modular
machine independent
standardized
regularly updated.
Weaknesses of COBOL
wordy
limited
hard to learn
slow
COBOL Facts
75% of the world's business data is in COBOL. -
Gartner Group
There are between 180 billion and 200 billion
lines of COBOL code in use worldwide. - Gartner
Group
15% of all new applications (5 billion lines)
through 2005 will be in COBOL. - Gartner Group
CICS transaction volume (such as COBOL-based
ATM transactions) grew from 20 billion per day
in 1998 to 30 billion per day in 2002. - The
Cobol Report
Facts continued
Replacement costs for COBOL systems, estimated at $25
per line, are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. - Tactical
Strategy Group
There are 90,000 COBOL programmers in North America
in 2002. Over the next four years there will be a 13%
decrease in their number due to retirement and death. -
Gartner Group
There are at least 10,000 "Free Agent" COBOL
programmers in the US today. - The Senior Staff
Facts Continued
The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years
are going to be COBOL programmers. - GIGA Group
Any programmer with above average skills in COBOL can
quickly learn the basics of Web Enabling, at home, through
self-training. - Bill Lockhart, Legacy Reservist
COBOL programmers could be the key to new IT. The
legions of COBOL programmers who helped organizations
get legacy applications ready for Y2K could find new work
bringing those applications into the Internet age. - IEEE
Computer, April 2000
COBOL Evaluation
Good for a first programming language
Big impact on other languages
widely used today
simple and understandable
dominant programming language in the
business computing domain
References
Www.csis.ul.ie/COBOL/Course/COBOLIntro.htm

http://www.cobolwebler.com/cobolfacts.htm

Cobol in an Open Source Future

http://cobolreport.com/columnists/tw/part2.asp