Does COBOL have a future?

And while COBOL is objectively a good language, it has long lost favour with most programmers. Young coders today prefer newer languages better suited to the current technological landscape, such as Python, JavaScript, Ruby, C# or Java. COBOL developers are now retiring faster than COBOL is.

Does COBOL pay well?

While ZipRecruiter is seeing annual salaries as high as $121,000 and as low as $49,500, the majority of Cobol Programmer salaries currently range between $79,000 (25th percentile) to $100,000 (75th percentile) with top earners (90th percentile) making $110,000 annually across the United States.

Is COBOL still useful?

COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs.

Is learning COBOL hard to learn?

1. COBOL is easy! Learning COBOL isn’t like learning a completely new language: it’s English! Its readability means that you can understand what a program is doing without having to learn a whole new syntax.

Is it worth learning COBOL?

If you want to have a job as a COBOL programmer, then sure, go ahead and learn it. For any other reason, like trying to learn something useful that might help you with modern programming techniques, no, don’t bother. In the year 2000 I read a statistic that there were more lines of COBOL written than all other languages combined.

Where is COBOL used today?

COBOL still runs the world in traditional banking, lots of large scale government systems, insurance and health care. If there is an IBM mainframe present odds are very good it is running COBOL and CICS in some capacity. While not sexy, lots of new COBOL code gets written annually.

Why are there so few young COBOL programmers out there?

Since newly educated programmers aren’t taught this language – and (if given the choice) would run screaming from a job that required it…there are very, very few young COBOL programmers out there.

Is COBOL an immortal language?

My 50 years on mainframes tell me COBOL (and FORTRAN) are immortal. From 2000–2013, supported a COBOL/CICS under z/OS at a major medical center. They eventually replaced the entire system with two server-based systems (one for the clinical side, one for the financial side – the mainframe did both).