The COBOL Legacy

by Richard T. Dué

As a consultant and mentor, I am usually exploring the newest, most exciting, and, hopefully, most productive technology. This summer I had the opportunity to speak about Object Technology at the COBOL 2002 conference in Chicago. I had expected that the audience would be made up of traditional data processing programmers who were interested in getting an overview of object orientation before they retired. Meeting offline with the participants, however, was an extremely interesting and eye-opening experience. We certainly weren't talking about leading-edge, exciting technology. In most universities and technical schools today, the only place you will encounter COBOL is in a history of computing class, as if COBOL were just a footnote to today's information processing systems. Yet, here are some of the real-world statistics the participants presented to me on the importance of what many of us might consider to be a dinosaur-era, data processing language: