Not long ago, I wrote that COBOL is not a dead language and there are still billions lines of COBOL code in production today. At COBOL’s inception back in 1959, the goal was to provide something close to natural language so that even business analysts could read the code. As a side effect, the language is really, really verbose. Each time a ruby, python or scala developer complains about the verbosity of Java, C# or C++, he should have a look at a COBOL program to see how much worse it could be :). Moreover, since there is no concept of a local variable in COBOL, the ability to factorize common pieces of code in PARAGRAPHS or SECTIONS is limited. In the end, the temptation to duplicate logic is strong. When you combine those two flaws: verbosity and duplicated logic, guess what the consequence is: it’s pretty easy in COBOL to inject bugs in conditions.

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Most C, Java, C++, C#, JavaScript… developers reading this blog entry might think that COBOL is dead and that SonarSource should better focus its attention on more hyped languages like Scala, Go, Dart, and so on. But in 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80 percent of the world’s business ran on COBOL, with more than 200 billion lines of code in existence and an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually. COBOL is mainly used in the banking and insurance markets, and according to what we have seen in the past years, the erosion of the number of COBOL lines of code used in production is pretty low. So not only is COBOL not YET dead, but several decades will be required to see this death really happen. We released the first version of the COBOL plugin at the beginning of 2010 and this language plugin was in fact the first one to embed our own source code analysis technology, even before Java, C, C++, PL/SQL, … So at SonarSource, COBOL is a kind of leading technology :).

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