Preserving COBOL

I love this Craigslist Ad that I came across.

CraiglistAd

This really got me thinking.  Is this where the “Life Air” of COBOL is located?  …In a bottle?

We seem to bottle up so many things to preserve the contents.

Are we as an industry putting a lid on COBOL, hoping it will perform today as it did yesterday until we can replace it with another package or another programming language?

How about dusting of the old bottle of COBOL, breaking the seal, openining the lid and breathing the power of COBOL.

See what COBOL has done for us in the past and leveraging its power to see what new things it can do for us today!

 

 

Bookmark the permalink.

About Doug

Doug Evans is the Technical Manager of Migrations and COBOL Solutions Support for Infosol, Inc.

2 Responses to Preserving COBOL

  1. Another interesting advantage that COBOL has over other languages is the cost to maintain the applications. There are studies done on what it costs to maintain applications in various languages based on cost per line of code.

    Quote from article…
    These factors were rolled up into a score called “technical debt,” the theoretical cost of repairing each line of code (at a rate of $75 per hour) that doesn’t follow good practices, as Computerworld notes. Java EE’s technical debt was pegged at $5.42 per line of code while Cobol impressed with a score of $1.26. Oracle Forms and .NET were second- and third-worst behind Java, with the industry average settling at $3.61. ABAP did the best with a score near zero.

    Here is the complete article.

    http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/12/bad-code-plagues-it-applications-especially-java-ones/

    It is good to understand the cost involved when looking at developing applications and than the cost to maintain the applications in the future.

    Don

  2. Doug says:

    Hi Don, thank you very much for these details. Viewing the cost at maintaining code in different languages is very interesting. You can easily see that even though COBOL is a very robust language, it is relatively easy to code and maintain compared to other programming languages. Hmm, maybe a reason why COBOL has been a productive programming language for over 50 years!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *