COBOL Future

Recently I have attended seminar on COBOL which was given by Captain COBOL. 

Just wanted to record few things from that session...:)

COBOL will be replaced by …

• Fortran: 1960s
• PL/I: 1970s
• PASCAL: 1980s
• C: 1990
• C++: 1995
• Java: 1998
• C#: 2001
• What's next?

COBOL is constantly evolving

• Java interoperability
• Unicode support
– (UTF-16, more and more UTF-8)
• XML processing for Web Services
• JSON support on the way

COBOL can be Java!

• You can write Java classes in COBOL
• Invoke Java methods from COBOL
• Inherit from Java classes in COBOL
• COBOL can be C!
• Write C functions with return value in COBOL
• Invoke C functions from COBOL
• COBOL can be multithreaded

COBOL is the Language of the Future!

• 54 million new lines of COBOL written every year
• The base is growing, not shrinking
• 1 million COBOL programmers