What is COBOL? The language of the present and the future.

SalasPastor
6 min readMay 25, 2021

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is the business-oriented programming language that practically drives the world economy as it is used in banks and financial institutions. And it is the language of the past that could also be the language of the present and the future.

Ask the average software developer about COBOL and he will look at you as if you had mentioned carbon paper or leaded gasoline. Before the terms full stack and DevOps existed, COBOL had implemented these functionalities, on the one hand allowing the programmer to code the frontend, through maps and formats, and the backend, which is where we extract the information from the databases.

Compared to modern languages like Go or Python, or even Pascal or C! COBOL seems tidy, clumsy, old-fashioned.

But COBOL has endured. Far from being an obsolete technology that we happily parted ways with, COBOL has become an institution. Massive COBOL codebases are still in use around the world, many of them running almost exactly as they were when they were first created. In Hollywood parlance, the COBOL language has “legs.”

History of COBOL. How old is COBOL?

COBOL is a language that just celebrated its first 60 years of existence, being August 17, 1960, the first…

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