Hi! Thanks for the question.
Here are some articles providing reasons why a lot of applications
specifically business software are still in COBOL.
"Today?s COBOL is the result of much determined work by the various
COBOL committees that have contributed to its evolution, among them
ISO, INCITS, ANSI, CODASYL, ECMA, SMTG and the national COBOL
committees represented by individual countries such as The
Netherlands, Canada, France, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, United
States, et al."
"When the COBOL language was first created, the CODASYL committee
envisioned that the IT industry was fast changing and that most
business systems would likely need to be modified during their
lifetime. New hardware and new software development techniques were
likely to follow. COBOL applications needed a way to adapt to
ever-changing environments without causing chaos inside the enterprise
systems development community. The solution was to make COBOL as
adaptable as possible and to incorporate, inside the source program
itself, whatever environmental documentation was required. This of
course resulted in the Environment Division, one of the four original
Divisions still in the COBOL language. By isolating ?all? the
environmental dependencies of a COBOL application in one place, it was
much easier to transport a COBOL application from one computer brand
to another, from one operating system to another, from one database to
another.
"The sheer momentum over 43 years from so many programmers producing
so many COBOL applications resulted in cottage industries of
supplemental software to aid in the task of COBOL application
development. No other programming language has such a robust IDE."
"COBOL: Still Relevant After All These Years"
http://www.cobolreport.com/columnists/jerome/part2.asp
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?The first one is that these programs will have to be maintained and
enhanced. That in turn means that there will be a continuing demand
for COBOL programmers with about 70% of the work in the form of
maintenance and the other 30% in the form of enhancements.?
?The second implication is that all new applications are going to have
to co-exist with this base of applications. So if you want to develop
a new application that's going to replace an existing application,
you're going to have to integrate the new application with the
existing system.?
?IBM has developed a master strategy for making COBOL, CICS, and DB2
the foundation for web and intranet applications. In this scenario,
CICS is the transaction processor for web applications, DB2 is the
database, and COBOL provides the business logic that drives these
applications. That takes care of all the programming except for the
user interfaces on the clients or terminals, and these can be
developed with Java, Visual Basic, or other programming languages.?
?Is COBOL Dying ... or Thriving??
http://www.infogoal.com/cbd/cbdz009.htm
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"The question is, why is Cobol still in widespread use? The answer is,
it does the job, it was conceived for business. Cobol is built around
the concept of moving things around in storage. Most languages are
built around a lower abstraction level and are more focused on
algorithms."
Furthermore, based on these numbers it is much more logical to improve
on the COBOL code than dumping it altogether.
- "75% of all production transactions on mainframes is done using Cobol."
- "Over 60% of all Web-access data resides on a mainframe"
- "Cobol mainframes process more than 83% of all transactions worldwide."
- "Over 95% of finance?insurance data is processed with Cobol."
"In Cobol's Defense"
http://cobolreport.com/columnists/roundtable/06162003.asp
The lifeblood of big business in America is still coded in COBOL.
?Consider these facts from industry watchers: 70 percent of the
world's data is processed by COBOL and nine out of 10 ATM transactions
are done using COBOL. Thirty billion online COBOL transactions are
processed daily; 492 of the Fortune 500 use COBOL, including the
entire Fortune 100, and current COBOL investment tops $3 trillion. You
get the ideathese legacy systems still have an important role to play
in business today.?
?COBOL's Revenge: When Programs Outlive the Programmers?
http://www.devx.com/devx/editorial/16357
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?The fact that old code can easily be brought forward into the newer
standards is one of Cobol?s biggest assets.?
?Rewriting the same applications over and over is not cost-effective
when you can easily rehost existing code and adapt it to meet your
needs. If there is a huge backlog of Cobol, rehosting with
interoperability makes business sense. When you want to modernise
Cobol applications, it is simply the least cost, least risk solution.
When rehosting an application, you retain the full features and
functions of your existing applications, minimise developer and user
retraining, and save countless hours of development and debugging
work.?
?Living with the Cobol legacy?
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/580914.cms
Search terms used
?Why are most programs still in COBOL??
COBOL still
COBOL dying
I hope these links would help you in your research. Before rating this
answer, please ask for a clarification if you have a question or if
you would need further information.
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Easterangel-ga
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