Cobol will be there a long time. Why? Because it is a de facto business language, it has fixed point arithmetic no C based language can easily touch, it is easy to manage in SC/CM systems, it has native data types, no problems moving from one platform to another, it is very pragmatic when writing business functions, it can be OO today, it mixes very well with other languages if needed, etc. And it is boring! Not really but it is like most structured languages where you don't have to reinvent new ways to handle information because there is basically just one way and it probably already is in your copy library.

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