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COBOL, the 63-year-old programming language, still plays an important role in running the global economy, but its popularity remained uncertain until recently.
According to research by the COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) working group, up to 850 billion lines of code currently exist, up from a previous estimate of 200-300 billion.
Looking ahead, about half of respondents agreed that they expect their organization’s COBOL applications to last for at least the next 10 years, and that they expect the amount of COBOL in use to increase over the next year, but COBOL wants to know more.
Is COBOL popular?
A new project in collaboration with The Linux Foundation Research and The Linux Foundation Training and Certification has been announced in an effort to understand the realities surrounding the modern use of COBOL and the sentiments around future investments.
The news follows earlier research from Micro focus (opens in new tab) which showed that more than nine in ten (92%) of respondents viewed COBOL as a strategic technology.
“This significant volume of COBOL application code on the market represents remarkable value to organizations and requires continued investment as part of a larger modernization strategy,” said Ed Airey, director of COBOL Product Marketing at Micro Focus.
New research summarized in the TIOBE index however, questions the validity of some of these claims, placing COBOL 27th with a score of 0.41% determined “by the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses and third-party suppliers”, not by market share. Python, on the other hand, takes first place with 16.66%, with C just a few decimal places behind.
Turning to the future, John Mertic, Director of Program Management for the Open Mainframe Project, took a blog post (opens in new tab) to solicit support and investment, claiming that “contributing sponsors to [the] research will be an important step in understanding and shaping the future of COBOL and the applications that drive the global economy.”