COBOL (“Common Business-Oriented Language”) is 61 years old. It has outlasted the Cold War, innumerable bad fashion trends, and dozens of technology-industry trends. Not only is the language still used, but a variety of organizations continue to see it as vital to their operations, according to new data.

A just-released poll by Micro Focus suggests that 70 percent of businesses that utilize COBOL and mainframe technology plan on “modernizing” their stack rather than replacing the language and its associated code entirely.  

“As we see the attitudes around COBOL modernization with changes to where and how it needs to be delivered and how its usage continues to grow, COBOL’s credentials as a strong digital technology appear to be set for another decade,” said Chris Livesey, Micro Focus’s senior vice president for application modernization and connectivity, wrote in a statement accompanying the data. “With 60 years of experience supporting mission-critical applications and business systems, COBOL continues to evolve as a flexible and resilient computer language that will remain relevant and important for businesses around the world.”

Moreover, these sysadmins and system architects are trying to align COBOL and mainframe initiatives with more modern ones, such as their cloud setups. Some 42 percent saw cloud as a “core and viable platform to support the business agenda,” while also working with COBOL. Some 63 percent of respondents also said that they were modernizing their COBOL system/applications “with a focus on functionality and process.”

COBOL is still in use (along with mainframes) at a number of federal agencies, including (as of 2016) the Department of Justice, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Financial institutions have also refused to abandon legacy systems running COBOL; for instance, in 2018, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Citi had at least two-dozen job openings that listed COBOL, according to eFinancialCareers. 

Although we’ve pronounced COBOL a language constantly threatened with obsolescence, it seems like it’ll continue to live so long as companies and government agencies refuse to abandon their legacy systems in favor of something more modern. That’s very good news for those developers and other technologists who have mastered COBOL and the delicate art of mainframe maintenance.