2026 · intermediate
COBOL - Round 2
Last year, Jim Lowden talked about the “Once and Future COBOL”. This is a follow up session just because last year’s session was so well received.
COBOL is an ongoing challenge for the world’s largest organizations. There are between 200 and 800 BILLION lines of COBOL source code for the production programs mostly written between the mid 1960s through the mid 1980s. The estimates are subject to much controversy but the 200B is pretty well accepted. In going over sample code we’ve worked on for Proof of Concept projects we found over 30 million lines in minor application samples provided by four end-user corporations. COBOL is verbose and the corpus is enormous.
I thought it would be fun to look at some example code, maybe take questions, time permitting, and talk a bit more about the difference between the modern (2023) COBOL Language Standard and the IBM 1968 compiler’s language.
Finally, I’m going to share some insights into the “COBOL Skills Shortage” and what that means for career opportunities as the job market continues to shift under our feet.