Cobol is Dead essays

Cobol is Dead essays The programming language COBOL has been available for over thirty years now. The standard for the code has only seen minor changes and those took place back in 1985 and then finally again in 2002. It has been stated that there are over 175 billion lines of this code functioning out in the world. However the world is changing and that code is not prepared to handle a lot of the requirements that need to be met. In a roundtable article in IEEE software entitled In Cobols Defense Six leaders attempt to defend the need for Cobol. John Bradley, CEO of Liant Software, defends Cobol by saying its around still because the code works. However this is flawed thinking because new code would work just as well, and would be easier to maintain. This is backed up in an article Application Transformation by James R. Borck in it he talks about the state of e-business and the practicality of Cobol. The problem is that Cobol applications can't run directly on the Internet, and even if you arrange for a Cobol program to be invoked by a Web application, the language isn't scalable enough for true online business processing. This leaves companies that use Cobol in a bad position for trying to manage business processes and data online. Borck states it's difficult to renew this legacy code. For one thing, Cobol is legendary for its wordiness and complexity, meaning that it takes plenty of difficult, line-by-line work to modify the code. Making even minor changes to 30-year-old, 80-column source code can put a heavy strain on your budget and your IT department's time and talents. This coupled with the fact that it is becoming harder to find Cobol programmers, because schools are teaching for the majority the newer languages, makes advancing the code harder and harder to do. The use of conversion tools while costly can take the old Cobol code and turn it into an easier language like Java. One such tool eMak...