how are they related?

Is COBOL still used?

Imagine that, yes. A language that is 65 years old is still in use.

Of course, companies are gradually abandoning COBOL. But in a number of areas it is still irreplaceable – it is the basis for systems related mainly to finance: the banking industry, stock exchanges, social services (the labor exchange in the USA as an example). And here is an infographic that shows the relevance of the language in 2017 (a little outdated, but still):

So the popularity of PL is not falling, but staying afloat and sometimes even growing. In August 2023, COBOL reached 15th place in the ranking among PLs. And in July of this year, it took 19th place in the ranking TIOBE.

TIOBE is a popular rating. It is formed on the basis of the following criteria:

• number of language queries in popular search engines;

• active discussion on specialized resources;

• number of vacancies with language indication.

It turns out that COBOL is still requested in some vacancies. It seems true: in 2020, there were still 100 developers who knew this PL invited to the American employment service. It turned out that it relies heavily on old technology.

Further proof: in 2022, the number of lines of code written in COBOL was 800 billionThe demand for the language was so high that a few years ago, 75-year-old programmer Bill Hinshaw founded a new organization that was engaged in supporting COBOL-based solutions.

An example COBOL program is a simple Hello World:

      	IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
       	PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
    	*
     	ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
    	*
     	DATA DIVISION.
    	*
     	PROCEDURE DIVISION.
     	PARA-1.
       	DISPLAY "Hello, world.".
    	*
         	EXIT PROGRAM.
       	END PROGRAM HELLO-WORLD.

But the situation is gradually changing. IBM Corporation developed a set of tools that allows you to port COBOL programs to Java — Watsonx Code Assistant. It is based on the CodeNet code generation model — it can understand not only COBOL and Java, but also about 80 other programming languages. The platform is trained on a huge array of data, it has 20 billion parameters.

The company offered its solution to partners, and they are gradually moving from the old infrastructure to the new one. Not only in the US, but also in other countries where COBOL is still used.

IBM estimates that 220 billion lines of code are currently running on mainframes and other systems. The updated version of the language provides precision of calculations, which is still difficult to achieve in other languages. For example, COBOL can perform mathematical operations with precision up to 38 decimal places, with truncation.

So the legacy of Grace Hopper and her colleagues lives on among us and brings us benefit. And now you know what you can tell your coworkers and friends on the first day of the last month of summer.