why is COBOL used in Business applications?

Answer 1

It's not necessarily exclusively for business applications, except that in the mainframe age, COBOL was a popular and easy language to deploy for business applications (hence the name, COmmon Business-Oriented Language). Large businesses find themselves still using legacy systems that run on mainframes using COBOL simply because the cost to migrate to something modern is too great.

The vast majority of modern business software is written in newer, more evolved languages.

Answer 2

Back in the olden days in the evolution of programming languages first there was machine code (all 0's and 1's) then assembler, then simple higher level languages such as BASIC and Fortran. While Fortran was just fine for mathmatical and engineering applications involving mostly number crunching, it was not designed for business needs. COBOL was developed to not only be able to crunch numbers but also be able to more easily deal with crunching formatted input files and producing more formatted files and hardcopy reports (in short it was good at both numbers AND letters). While there are now many modern higher level languages that can do what COBOL does with a lot less overhead and hassle, the fact remains that much older "legacy" code still exists out there and some companies simply choose to continue to maintain and enhance their systems in COBOL rather than have to endure the pain and expense of converting to a different language and platform. Present day, very few companies if developing a system completely from scratch would choose COBOL.

Answer 3

That's what it was developed for: COmmon Business Oriented Language. That was the language-of-choice several decades ago when huge systems were developed. It was easy to learn, powerful, and somewhat extensible. And, big businesses ran their systems on IBM mainframes; perfect for running COBOL.

Yes, billions of lines of COBOL were written and probably billions still exist today. I work for a large aerospace company and we still have tens of millions of lines of COBOL running in production. You can still purchase commercial software that is written in COBOL, although that is becomming less comon.

Answer 4

The simple answer is, there is a lot of business software out there that has been used and proven over the years. It is a solid way of managing your IT.

Answer 5

It works really well and it costs a lot to convert to SQL or dot net or SAP + ABAP or C++ or whatever else is the "Next generation language" this month.

Answer 6

Mainly speed!