Mar 15, 2012

COBOL Isn't Going Away

     Social Security is stuck with a lot of old mainframe computer programs written using the COBOL computer language. The agency is trying to transition from COBOL but an article in Computerworld makes me wonder whether the transition is really necessary or practical.
     In any case, Social Security is not alone in having lots of COBOL code. COBOL remains ubiquitous in large data processing operations.
     If you know someone who wants really good job security, tell them to study COBOL. No matter what anyone says, it's clearly not going away in the foreseeable future.

1 comment:

Nobbins said...

That would be ashame if COBOL is here to stay. Doing anything with the mainframe right now is tedious and cumbersome and inefficient. More than half the people at HQ are in DCS (Systems), and but no matter how much manpower they throw at the problem, it's still slow. Running analytics on even the most basic amount of information involves several programmers, custom coding, and months of wait time.

I agree that COBOL isn't going away anytime soon, but that's quite unfortunate.