COBOL – ISO/IEC 1989

Invented in 1959, COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages still in active use today. Designed for business applications, COBOL is known for its verbose syntax and lack of modern features. Despite its age, COBOL is still used in a variety of industries, including banking, insurance, and government. While COBOL has been largely overshadowed by newer languages in the last few decades, it remains an important part of the software landscape. In 2014, the US government announced that it was investing $600 million to update its COBOL systems. And in 2018, IBM released a new version of COBOL designed for the cloud. COBOL’s continued use is due in part to its popularity in legacy systems. Many businesses have invested heavily in COBOL applications over the years, and rewriting all that code would be a costly and time-consuming endeavor. For some organizations, the stability and predictability of COBOL is worth the trade-off of missing out on newer features. Despite its longevity, COBOL is not a perfect language. Its verbose syntax can make code difficult to read, and its lack of features can make it challenging to work with. But for many businesses, COBOL is a reliable workhorse that gets the job done.