Most the people I saw doing COBOL are older white guys. Does anyone even learn COBOL now?
It is still taught in India
I was working at PacBell in San Diego in 1985 when an opportunity appeared. A 53,000 line file of name/value pairs was shipped in from Bellcore. It needed to be processed to remove and modify some of the fields. The COBOL staff in Hayward wrote code to perform the task. It ran 16 1/2 hours. I was asked to write a C program to accomplish the requested changed. My code ran in the UNIX common bank on the same physical machine that ran the COBOL. The exact input file used for the COBOL run was provided to me. My C code did the job in 20 minutes. That was the genesis of a software development career that ended in June 2025 at Leidos.
In the current time, I would write the code in PERL or Python and anticipate a similar run time as the C code. The task was totally unsuitable for a COBOL solution.
It was my first programming language, well, that and Pascal. The company I do winter gigs at still has a few legacy systems around. It is adequate for mainframe apps, and doesn't break. I no longer use it, but it exists. Somebody is maintaining it, and all the geezers have been fired or forcibly retired, so there's that.
AI Overview
Yes, COBOL is still heavily used, particularly in banking, insurance, and government sectors. It acts as the backbone for over 95% of ATM transactions and 80% of in-person banking. Despite being over 60 years old, it runs massive batch processes due to its efficiency with large-scale data and its reliability.
Why is COBOL Still Used?
Massive Infrastructure: Over 200 billion lines of code are still in active use.
Banking Backbone: About 43% of banking systems, including top banks, still depend on it.
Cost of Change: Rewriting these systems is expensive and risky, making maintenance of old systems more practical.
Reliability: It is extremely stable and efficient at processing high-volume transactions, such as for the IRS.
Continual Evolution: It is not dead code; COBOL standards were updated as recently as 2023.