Is COBOL still exist out there?

[franklinj]

Recently I join a software company as quality assurance, to oversees their SDLC and documentations, and I found that they are using COBOL. Isn't that an very old programming language? Anyone here still using it?

[vinyl-junkie]

I am not using it myself, but there are others where I work that do. In fact, there are a lot of companies that still use COBOL. I've seen a lot of places trying to move away from it though. It's expensive and time consuming to do that, and with the global economy being what it is right now, I don't see companies being able to afford moving away from COBOL anytime soon.

[dotnetmind]

Yes, Cobol still a preferred language in the business world

Refer to this post to get more info

[Inigoesdr]

Yes, Cobol still a preferred language in the business world

"Preferred" is a bit of a stretch. People are definitely still using it, but in my experience it's due to companies being scared to migrate to a newer system. Everyone I've talked to still using COBOL is in a maintenance role keeping up with a legacy system; not using it for new products. It's just not a popular language, and hasn't been for 20+ years. There are much better alternatives out there for pretty much any task COBOL does.

[keystoneiss]

Been around for centuries... ok well decades anyways... since the 70's it's been the heavy lifter for large and mega corporate financial systems, particularly mainframe. It's not so much the "preferred" as the defacto which really translates to: these systems are so old and huge that recoding or replacing it with something else would not be cost efficient in ANY way. It works, it does what we need it would cost big bucks to replace... let's just maintain and slowly expand what we have, additional features that COBOL can't handle can be applied as a VAP on top if needed!

[franklinj]

For banking industry it is unavoidable to still use COBOL as some or most of their back-end systems are AS/400, but for a mid-range software house that does not deal with banking, it is kinda "weird" though. Anyway, business is business.