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[30]Analysis

The persistence of COBOL: why a 60-year old language is still in demand

It's not often in technology that something lasts more than a few years, let
alone six decades as is the case with the COBOL programming language. We look
at why the language is still so important and whether its going to fade away
any time soon.

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By [37]Pat Martlew

IDG Connect
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Within the realm of technology, one thing that could generally
considered a static rule of thumb is that things are constantly
changing. Innovation, especially in the cloud era, is constantly
occurring and hard to keep track of, as one trend displaces the last in
an ever-quickening game of technological leapfrog. This is equally true
when it comes to software development, as cloud native organisations
chase seamless CI/CD pipelines, DevOps, and agile development
practices.

Bucking this trend, though, is the COBOL programming language, which —
despite being developed in the late 1950s — still fulfills a
fundamental role for many organisations running transaction-based
legacy business applications. The aging language is still remarkably
pervasive, to the point where news reports surface every few years
denouncing its existence within business-critical systems while
highlighting the various issues that COBOL code presents to
organisations and developers.

The persistence of COBOL has been illustrated recently as the
Coronavirus pandemic puts increased strain on wide range of IT
infrastructure. The programming language was highlighted as a major
issue in the US government's $2.2 trillion CARES stimulus program and
within the processing of increased unemployment claims, with state
agencies [59]blaming delays in cheque handouts on COBOL, and in
particular a lack of available talent (which is often a real sticking
point). IBM even sought to [60]address this issue by teaming up with
the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project by launching a free COBOL
training program as well as a technical forum allowing COBOL
programmers to provide free advice and expertise during the outbreak.

While this may seem to paint a picture of a hopeless old language that
is unnecessarily stifling innovation, the persistence of COBOL is more
nuanced that it may seem. There are many relevant factors that
contribute to why organisations might want to keep COBOL around and
it's not just as simple as gutting and sending it into oblivion.
Although that's not to say that there aren't some serious issues with
the language — and the culture that surrounds it — that need to be
addressed.

Why is COBOL still so prevalent?

COBOL was initially developed in 1959 as a business-orientated
programming language that ran almost exclusively on large mainframe
computers and served as an incredibly useful tool in modernising what
were often paper-based business processes. The language was commonly
used for transaction-based processing and continues to power many
finance and administrative systems used by banks and the public sector.

[61]According to Reuters, 220 billion lines of COBOL code remain in use
today and this is showing no signs of slowing down. The reasons behind
this are mixed, but a lot of the time it comes down to the fact that
it's quite difficult to present a compelling business case to rip and
replace COBOL. It's incredibly expensive and complicated to do so given
how entrenched it is within the mainframe environments, and the
decades-old monolithic nature of the applications themselves - as
illustrated when the Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced its core
COBOL-driven banking platform in 2012 at a cost of over [62]1 billion
Australian dollars (749.9 million USD).

Another reason COBOL has carried on so long is simply that the
applications can actually work exactly as they need to and the language
[63]isn't necessarily obsolete. Derek Britton, global head of product
marketing at COBOL custodian Micro Focus illustrates this point,
arguing COBOL's original use-cases are still just as relevant today as
when it was first developed.

"For COBOL, the classic use-cases for a language - which is famously
designed for 'business applications' - are fairly self-evident and
remain as true today as they were throughout COBOL's history. COBOL
applications are the lifeblood for some of the world's most successful
organisations and also run countless government departments across the
globe," Britton says.

"These are applications that match COBOL's capacity for data-heavy work
(needing to access, process, manipulate, and report on large amounts of
clearly-defined, structured data), significant arithmetic or processing
activities (handling complex numeric calculation, without error), and
working at speed and scale (handling millions of transactions in a
short space of time). It is no surprise COBOL remains a bedrock in
banking, insurance, healthcare, logistics and many other industries."

Which industries are still reliant on COBOL?

As mentioned, there are a few key industries that rely on COBOL
infrastructure, with application footprints being significant within
the financial sector, government services, telecommunications and
healthcare. Bola Rotibi, Research director at Analyst firm CCS Insight
says these sectors are the ones that are most hungry for COBOL
developer talent, due to the nature of the language and its proficiency
within their business dealings.

"COBOL applications are mainly used in transaction processing
applications, hence a staple of the Financial Services sector and other
industries that rely on processing a large volume of transactions
quickly, and often in batches," Rotibi says.

"Government services responsible for calculating tax receipts and
returns and making benefit payments to citizens, as well as airlines
handling the ticketing of passengers, rely on transaction operations
that need to be highly performant and reliable. This is a key reason
why their COBOL applications remain crucial to their business
operations."

As one of the major COBOL implementors, the financial sector was one of
the most evidently impacted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Vilve Vene, CEO and co-founder of European fintech
Modularbank, COBOL reliance and the associated skills challenge was one
of many issues that became evident as a result of the outbreak.

"The issue that comes with systems running on COBOL is that opening up
these systems to the outside world is a very lengthy, complex and
costly process," Vene explains.

"So far, we have seen banks investing huge amounts of money to revamp
their legacy systems by building additional layers on top of it.
However, this is not an effective solution to the problem as COBOL was
not fundamentally built to support the flows of real-time demand."

While Vene argues that COBOL, as well as all legacy bank
infrastructure, should be eventually replaced with more modern
architectures for competitive reasons, she says this will have to be
done gradually "in order of priorities" as replacing the whole system
would be too disruptive.

The extent of the skills shortage

While the skills shortage may be most evident during major demand
‘spikes', such as those driven by COVID-19, the issue has remained a
concerning talking point for decades now. The lack of talent is driven
by a few key factors, but one of the most significant ones the scarcity
of education, considering computer science courses at universities
largely don't teach the language anymore, resulting in a serious lack
of new, younger developer talent.

The skills shortage around COBOL remains quite a serious issue for many
organisations, not only because many developers aren't familiar with
the language, but because COBOL work generally requires a high-level,
specific, and intricate understanding of the COBOL application
environment. Keith Banham, mainframe R&D manager at Macro 4 and
40-year mainframe technologies veteran elaborates on this issue,
framing the skills shortage as a "crisis" that does deeper than the
language itself.

"It's important to recognise that the skills crisis is not simply about
a shortage of people who understand how to code in the COBOL language.
The deeper issue is the lack of application knowledge. Being able to
code in COBOL is the first step. The really hard part is understanding
what an application does. If you don't have that knowledge you run the
risk of making mistakes," Banham says.

"An experienced COBOL developer with knowledge of an application will
understand, for example, how changing code in one part of a system will
affect another part. When you lose that experience, new developers are
unaware of the implications of making changes."

One example of this is the use of copybooks by COBOL programmers, which
allow them to insert the same section of code into numerous places
within the system. Anyone who updates that shared code needs to
understand exactly how their changes will affect all of the different
parts of the system. This kind of extensive previous knowledge is
massively important in the world of COBOL, to the extent where
organisations have previously clung to [64]elderly COBOL programmers
because they hold the "keys to the kingdom", so to speak.

Should developers be learning COBOL now?

From a developer's perspective, COBOL can be a very useful language to
learn, as it is still so widely used by some of the world's largest
enterprises, with the vast majority of business applications running on
IBM mainframes containing COBOL code. Sean Farrington, SVP of EMEA for
SaaS technology training platform Pluralsight says the continued
popularity of COBOL presents an attractive opportunity for prospective
developers, as having an understanding of both COBOL and more modern
languages is a skillset worth having.

"Despite its age, COBOL still underpins many of the finance and
administrative systems used by banks and the public sector. Without the
skills to work with COBOL, this legacy code cannot be maintained - and
it cannot be modernised or updated either," Farrington explains.

"For example, if traditional banks want to keep up with agile fintechs,
having the talent in place that can work with both COBOL skills and
newer languages is key. Whether it is translating COBOL into a modern
language like Java or Python without losing functionality, or
integrating COBOL with new tools, expertise in the language is still
required. And with billions of lines of COBOL code still in use, it
will likely be a skill that developers will benefit from having for
years to come."

However, while the job opportunities can be solid and extremely safe
options for COBOL developers, the work can be relatively uninspiring.
As developers are sought after, COBOL talent can often be pigeonholed
in a sense, with little opportunity to expand their horizons. For those
devs looking to work in a fast-moving, modern ‘start-up' like
environment, a job maintaining decades-old COBOL architecture can be a
hard sell. It can also be quite difficult to get started with for
developers, as the [65]syntax varies quite considerably to other
languages.

Longevity of the language moving forward

Given it's widespread, permeating nature within key industries, it's
unlikely that COBOL will be disappearing altogether any time soon.
Fundamentally, there is a whole ecosystem of tools and services that
have grown to support and maintain the longevity of COBOL applications.

According to Rotibi, while there have been extensive efforts to
streamline the language for modern development approaches, she still
expects a subtle, gradual move to update COBOL infrastructure across
the board.

"I do think that there will continue to be a steady long term move to
modernising existing COBOL applications. But this will come in the
context of an organisation's digital transformation strategy and also
in weighing up the cost benefits for redesigning an existing COBOL
solution," Rotibi says.

"Many COBOL applications continue to be fit for purpose with regards to
the business logic and transaction they support. Great strides have
been made in evolving the core platforms that run COBOL applications
enabling them to meet the operational performance requirements for
modern transactions and application solutions. Even though some effort
has been made to modernise some aspects of the COBOL language, I think
that there are plenty of modern software application technologies
available today that more than meet the needs for the kind of
applications required going forward."

However, Rotibi reinforces that this won't happen overnight, and that
the language will not fade away, noting the billions of lines of code
still in production environments. The efforts to modernise COBOL itself
she refers to have also cemented themselves amongst CIOs as extremely
[66]viable alternatives to ripping out the language and associated
mainframes completely, due to the associated cost savings. Many efforts
have been made to bring COBOL into the 21^st century, including
solutions that facilitate COBOL to run alongside [67]JAVA on mainframes
and even a recent push to get the COBOL applications to run as
[68]containers on Kubernetes.

As a further example, Sam Knutson, vice president of product management
at Compuware says IBM's efforts to update COBOL's compiler has allowed
the language to persist through the ages.

"What's unique about COBOL is the compiler, which IBM has done a
masterful job at continuously improving every few months," Knutson
explains.

"These improvements have ensured COBOL's consistent speed and
performance and helped to fine tune machine code so that it can most
effectively and efficiently drive the latest and greatest compute
resources on the mainframe. That's why the world's economy rightfully
runs on more than 220 billion lines of COBOL code, and that number is
increasing every day."

However, regardless of whether COBOL has a bright, bland, or bleak
future ahead of it, one of its major issues is around the culture that
generally surrounds it. If organisations want to maintain an adequate
talent pool of COBOL developers, the language and associated
infrastructure needs to be modernised somewhat so that it's an easier
sell to developer talent. At the end of the day, the last thing modern
developers want to do is work on a single, aging, idiosyncratic
language, doing maintenance work for the rest of their careers.

"If the traditional developer experience on the mainframe is still in
use - notorious for siloed culture, rigid, experiment-averse processes
and text-based ‘green screen' tools - organisations can't expect to
attract the talented next-gen programmers they desperately need to
commit as the next stewards of their mission-critical COBOL
applications," Knutson continues.

"They cannot count on talented new developers to pay a personal tax in
time, effort and inspiration for digitally subpar culture, processes,
and tools in the face of escalating expectations. This is the same as
hoping competitors will throttle their own innovation to ensure a rival
organisation has time to catch up; it's never going to happen."

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