COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.
Which reminds me, mainframes are still alive and well too. Banking, insurance, governments, inventory management – all the same places you’ll find COBOL, you’ll find mainframes as well.
None of that is as sexy as the latest AI program or the newest cloud-native computing release, but old dogs with their old tricks still have useful work to perform.
Rewriting existing systems is one of the riskiest things a company can do, so old codebases are going to be around for a long time.
Those old COBOL codebases likely contain 50 years of bug fixes for every possible edge case. It’d take a long time to rewrite everything and ensure feature parity, and there’s usually not a significant business reason to rewrite it (after all, a successful end result is just that the system behaves exactly the same as the old one).
The COBOL language is still getting updates, too.
This is one of the reasons COBOL programmers get paid extremely well. Nobody is learning it anymore and these people are critical if an issue occurs.
Do they though…? I’m not sure they do.
You point is right, but the example is not correct. All languages such as C/C++ are reliable, and way more efficient with ressources. The environment to make simple software such as we browser or text editor are incredibly big. Firefox on a random front page took 300M ram. Same web browser and text editors used to run on 64Mb ram. Same need, a lot more efficiency
However, in tech we are used to be blind to the work needed to carry one one technology. Banks have dedicated firms to keep COBOL running and update it with everything that was missing back in time. Techbros make shit, true. But there is no magical technologies, only workers
Linux is glamorous.
While what’s said here is true, it can also be said about old cast iron pipes or 50s brick buildings with bitum and asbestos, and such.
