A few days ago, the programming language
COBOL celebrated its 60th birthday. The german IT news portal "heise online" has published an
article. At first glance, this is not worth mentioning. The longer IT exists, the older the hardware, software and methods get. Everything has birthday sometime
🙂
Interesting was a reference in the article to a
study by Reuters. It states that 43% of all banking systems rely on COBOL. Although I don't know the total amount of banking systems, there are many different banks in Germany. Presumably there are also many different banking systems or many different customized banking systems. These systems, like all IT systems, need to be maintained and enhanced.
About maintenance and further development, the study notes that COBOL is no longer popular among developers. If I would ask students, I suppose that would be absolutley true. Unfortunately, many students don't even know that ABAP exists
😉 Conversely, it seems almost impossible to replace historically grown systems. This results in a complicated situation.
While reading, I remembered the interview with Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob") I wrote a
blog about. In the interview, he said that society depends today much more on software as in earlier times (1960-1970). This makes topics such as "Refactoring" and "Clean Code" more important, because there is now much more source code. According to the study of Reuters about 220 billion lines of COBOL source code. In my opinion COBOL and ABAP will still exist in 20 years. So there will be a lot more source code ...
What can be learned from the history of COBOL? Depending on the business environment, software doesn't simply disappear. As a result, a programming language doesn't simply disappear. Many applications cannot be rewritten in another programming language due to a lot of reasons. This applies to software written in COBOL as well as ABAP and many other programming languages. Therefore my source code may still be in use in 20 or more years.
In summary: Perhaps another good reason to check the
ABAP Clean Code styleguide, to share our knowledge and to try writing maintainable source code.
Best regards and thanks for reading
Michael
