The US is urgently looking for COBOL experts due to the coronavirus. And they can't find it.

Authorities in the American state of New Jersey have begun searching for programmers who know the COBOL language due to the increased load on old PCs in the American employment system due to the coronavirus. As The Register writes, specialists will need to update software on 40-year-old mainframes, which can no longer cope with the load that has grown sharply amid the increased number of unemployed due to the CoVID-19 pandemic.

The shortage of COBOL-savvy programmers is not limited to New Jersey. In the state of Connecticut, authorities are also looking for specialists in this language, and in this case the search is being conducted jointly with officials from three other states. Tom's Hardware writes that their efforts, like in New Jersey, have not yet led to success. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-jersey-cobol-coders-mainframes-coronavirus

According to a Computer Business Review survey (https://www.cbronline.com/news/cobol-code-bases) conducted in the first quarter of 2020, the problem of the need to modernize software is currently faced by 70% of companies that, for one reason or another, still use programs written in COBOL. The exact number of such enterprises is unknown, but according to Reuters, 2020 billion lines of code of this language are used worldwide in 220.

COBOL is actively used not only in employment systems, but also in financial organizations. The 61-year-old language powers 43% of banking applications, and 95% of ATMs worldwide use software created with it to some extent.

One of the reasons why organizations are in no hurry to abandon COBOL and switch to programs created using current programming languages ​​is the high cost of updating. This was demonstrated by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which decided to completely replace all applications written in COBOL.

Representatives of the bank reported that the transition to the new software took five years - it took place from 2012 to 2017. The cost of this large-scale event is known - the update cost the bank almost $750 million.

Source: linux.org.ru