News Flash – COBOL Rises from Its Own Non-Ashes

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Article from Issue 247/2021
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Of all the strange news this month, the one item that really caught my eye was the announcement of IBM's COBOL for Linux 1.1 compiler. I guess most of us are aware that millions of lines of business software around the world are still written in COBOL, and for that reason, old-school COBOL programmers still have work. But think about this for a minute: COBOL has existed for 62 years, the x86 architecture has been around for 43 years, and Linux has been with us for 30 years.

Dear Reader,

Of all the strange news this month, the one item that really caught my eye was the announcement of IBM's COBOL for Linux 1.1 compiler. I guess most of us are aware that millions of lines of business software around the world are still written in COBOL, and for that reason, old-school COBOL programmers still have work. But think about this for a minute: COBOL has existed for 62 years, the x86 architecture has been around for 43 years, and Linux has been with us for 30 years. Yet at this late date, the (97-year-old) IBM steps up now to announce a Linux COBOL compiler for the x86?

It is easy to see why IBM, whose clients include many old-school companies running old-school software, would continue to maintain their COBOL compilers. But a new compiler for x86 Linux? That's not just maintaining – that's investing!

[...]

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