Why does the Social Security Agency continue to embrace  CoBOL? In its 2012-2016 Strategic Plan, it states:
"COBOL has served SSA and similar large transactional processing organizations well for over 40 years; COBOL's longevity is a distinct advantage for us, given the support and stability of the product."

Humorously titled, this short paper offers some comparisons between CoBOL and Java. The conclusion is especially apt: "When it comes down to the question of which will best survive, the bottom line is that COBOL can be much more easily enhanced to include web features than Java can be enhanced to handle records. Adding web routines to COBOL is being done; adding record handling to Java is not and cannot be done, without a major change to Java's restrict…

Fact #30: "CoBOL is a very bad language, but all the others for business data processing are so much worse."

Robert Glass, notable IT author and contributor to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), waxes insightfully into our love/hate relationship with CoBOL, delving into the differences between domain specific and domain independent languages. In the end, his conclusion: "The r…

An interesting exchange between the Inspector General's office on the Social Security Agency's use of CoBOL, its increasing use of Java, and its modernization efforts.  The facts presented as context are as important as the recommendations and conclusions, and underscore the importance of CoBOL to the financial industry. Also interesting is how the SSA's annual budget of $100M for operation and maintance for 60 million lines of code of CoBOL compares fa…