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COBOL Turning 50, Still Important
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from a story about COBOL's influence as it approaches 50 years in existence:
"According to David Stephenson, the UK manager for the software provider Micro Focus, 'some 70% to 80% of UK plc business transactions are still based on COBOL.' ... Mike Gilpin, from the market research company Forrester, says that the company's most recent related survey found that 32% of enterprises say they still use COBOL for development or maintenance. ... A lot of this maintenance and development takes place on IBM products. The company's software group director of product delivery and strategy, Charles Chu, says that he doesn't think 'legacy' is pejorative. 'Business constantly evolves,' he adds, 'but there are 250bn lines of COBOL code working well worldwide. Why would companies replace systems that are working well?'"
Good point. COBOL is adequate.
It's just not k3w1. Script kiddi3z don't use it. Hax04 d00dz don't like it. Boring grownups with real work to do use it, and they do real work with it. How uninteresting!
What COBOL won't do well or at all -- write Linux device drivers, write 3D game engines, or overflow buffers and take control of somebody else's system in order to send spam. What it will do -- process lots of data, paying attention to every penny.
C, on the other hand, is a miserable language for almost everything except system-level (kernel, driver) hacking. Its widespread use for many other functions is a stupid fashion.