COBOL: 'Nuf Said

What with all the chatter about Web 2.0, LAMP, Ruby, and the like, it is sometimes easy to forget that in the real world stuff like COBOL--yes, COBOL--still exists.

That's why it is interesting, although probably not that significant, when EvolveWare, a vendor that builds tools for automating the analysis, documentation, and transformation of applications and databases, pats itself on the back about migrating 325,000 lines of COBOL code to .NET in less than 10 months.

According to EvolveWare, the company did this with using its of S2T (Source-2-Target) Migration Tools for COBOL and Adabas/Natural that provided an automated knowledge discovery rate of 100 percent and a transformation rate above 85 percent (whatever that means). There was no explanation of whether EvolveWare did this for a client, or that it just happened to have time on their hands and 325,000 lines of legacy code laying around.

In the scope of things, however, 325,000 lines of COBOL code is probably a drop in the bit-bucket. According to some reports, even Microsoft said a few years ago that 1 million a year of new lines of COBOL were still being added to legacy code bases. In truth, no one knows how many lines of COBOL code are out there; let's just say "a lot." In any event, lines of code is far from the best metric discussing programming languages.

The one thing that always comes to mind when the topic of COBOL pops up, is something Al Stevens, a senior contributing editor to Dr. Dobb's Journal, once said (and I paraphrase): "You'll never hear me say anything bad about COBOL. It put food on my table for a lot of years." 'Nuf said.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:17 PM  Permalink