Are COBOL specialists no longer needed? A free compiler has appeared that reduces the need for developers
Not long ago we wrote that one of the oldest programming languages, COBOL, seems to be leaving the market soon. And not because it is irrelevant, on the contrary, so far this language is in demand, mainly in the financial and banking industries. The thing is that they are looking for a replacement for it, or rather, a method that will allow software written in COBOL to be ported to different languages. Previously, this was done by IBM, but now other opportunities have appeared. In particular, the free GnuCOBOL compiler.
What is this project?
As mentioned above, he called GnuCOBOL. The team developed it for about 20 years, not very quickly, but still constantly adding and modifying something. Now GnuCOBOL can already be used in industry and the banking industry, where, in fact, software written in COBOL is used.
The compiler allows large and small companies to gradually reduce their dependence on a language that is already half a century old. According to the developers, the main advantage of GnuCOBOL is the translation of a program written in COBOL into a C representation for further compilation using a C compiler.
The project, in addition to being free, has another advantage – it can be used in different operating systems, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, BSD and others. An important point: COBOL is not at all in the form in which it appeared, the language is evolving. Today there are a couple of dozen versions, “dialects,” and the compiler can work with most of them.
GnuCOBOL is already used by a number of large companies, many of which prefer the free compiler to paid projects. For example, one of these options is the proprietary Micro Focus, which is now inferior to the new product in many ways. By the way, not only commercial organizations are switching to modern technologies.
The French Ministry of Finance can be cited as an interesting case – the department abandoned the old fleet of servers and even the mainframe (we recently wrote about them), preferring new equipment and GnuCOBOL. This is because switching to GnuCOBOL allows you to achieve increased productivity and get rid of lock-in to one vendor.
From GnuCOBOL related events also can be mentioned publication of the first version of the integrated development environment SuperBOL Studio, written in Ocaml. It is distributed under the AGPLv3, MIT and ISC licenses. SuperBOL Studio is an extension to the VS Code editor that works with GnuCOBOL. It is intended mainly for developing, debugging and profiling projects in the COBOL language. SuperBOL also provides an LSP (Language Server Protocol) server implementation for integrating COBOL code navigation, parsing, and editing tools into another IDE.
By the way, there is another project – from IBM. The corporation has developed a special set of tools for automatically converting COBOL code into Java code. And this is not a theoretical development, not a proof of concept, but a commercial tool that is offered to the company’s partners. It's called Watsonx Code Assistant.
The code that is created using Watsonx Code Assistant will not conflict with other systems, even if they are outdated. The code is object-oriented, which means it will maintain compatibility both with modules written in COBOL and with services like CICS, IMS, DB2.
What about the programming language itself?
COBOL has been around for over 60 years. Despite this, it is still actively used. Of course, in the vast majority of areas it has been replaced by modern programming languages. But the fact is that in a number of countries hardware systems with software based on this language still operate. There are especially many of them in the USA.
Therefore, COBOL remains afloat and has even gained popularity in the last few years. For example, in August 2023, the language ranked 15th in popularity among languages. A year ago it was in 31st place. Impressive growth. But after a while, perhaps, it will become history.
Here is an infographic from 2017, created as part of a Reuters study. Of course, 7 years have passed, but it’s unlikely that all these organizations and systems switched to new languages at once – it’s too expensive. Some people did, but the majority preferred the new, well-functioning and time-tested old one.
The problem is that there are still many systems that are written in the old language, but there are very few programmers who understand them well and are able to write something in COBOL. And most of them are about 60-70 years old. Therefore, companies have to look for specialists all over the world.
Now, we must think, the dependence on the language will gradually decrease, since there are more and more tools for switching to other languages. We probably have to wait 3-5 years, but who knows, maybe more.
