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The thirtysomething Cobol language shows no signs of losing strength, despite intermittent predictions over the years about its death.
In fact, many observers say Cobol development is gaining momentum on desktops as MIS organizations expand efforts to downsize and offload applications from the mainframe. Those observers note that Cobol--the most commonly used language in mainframe application development --is familiar territory to MIS.
"We have lots of people writing Windows applications better in Cobol" than in C, said John Triance, U.K. group vice president in the Products Group of Micro Focus, Ltd., Palo Alto, Calif. "All of our products are written in Cobol."
"Cobol is like the English language --it evolves," added Dan Gilliland, Micro Focus core product manager. "The Cobol of today is not the same language as the Cobol of 30 years ago."
When Micro Focus began selling a PC version of Cobol in 1976, much of the rest of the leading-edge computing world was shouting for the then-new fourth-generation languages. However, observers today say that Micro Focus' vision was right---Cobol business remains strong while 4GLs struggle.
"When we first started selling a Cobol compiler, we targeted people building applications on the PC," Triance said. "Later, we discovered that users needed full support for mainframe Cobol, so we created emulations of CICS and IMS for PCs."
The Micro Focus Workbench, first shipped in 1985, has a strong position in the market today, observers say. Some analysts estimate that Micro Focus owns about 90% of the offloading market and 80% of the PC development market.
The Micro Focus OEM pacts with industry leaders IBM and Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., are credited with providing the company's wide edge over several of its competitors in PC Cobol sales....