COBOL is still running where it’s running because those old applications 1) work and 2) are very expensive to rewrite. Unimportant programs were abandoned. Simple one were migrated to Java decades ago. The useful-and-complicated — and often badly designed — are what remain.

If you’re a bank, you run COBOL. Estimates are 95% of ATM transactions go through a COBOL program.

But it doesn’t have to run on a mainframe! We’re adding COBOL to the GNU Compiler Collection. www.cobolworx.com.