Micro Focus has always been a staunch advocate of the COBOL standards process. I remember (long, long ago) working to get ANSI 85 certification (an interesting challenge as the standard, the compiler and the certification suites all seemed to be getting created simultaneously!) Micro Focus’ support for the standards process is still true today and you may have seen our recent announcement (click here to read the announcement) coinciding with the working group meeting in California.

I think the standards process has, overall, been a pretty good thing for COBOL - there is a good core standard and it has evolved over a long period of time to encompass every new technology as it came along - structured programming, object orientation, XML, web architectures, and now we’re moving towards the Cloud ... who knows what’s next? While all these innovations where being made, the core capabilities for high performance, high capacity, mission critical systems has never been lost. A pretty remarkable achievement.

By contrast, supposedly "standard" languages such as Java are starting to flounder somewhat. There have been some moves toward standardization to open up the language but significant enhancements have really dried up recently and I've never quite found the "write once run anywhere" nearly as real as what has been done with COBOL. Every week seems to generate a new “Java-like-but-better” language that come and go so quickly you can’t keep up.

Taking another route, which might be described as a "benevolent dictatorship", is C#. Don't get me wrong, here - Microsoft are doing some fantastic things with the language and framework. But would it progress faster and on more platforms if there was a widely supported standard and competing compiler/platform vendors?

So, I think standards have mostly strengthened COBOL. Or am I wrong? Perhaps you, as real users of the language don't care or aren’t happy with the way standards evolve? Is the important thing, really, that Micro Focus offers outstanding mainframe compatibility rather than simply adherence to the standards?

There will be discussion of the COBOL standard as it stands, its future and the process at Micro Focus World, but if you have any comments, please add them here and let’s get the discussion started now.

Perhaps you could also start nominating what features you think Micro Focus and the standards groups should be considering in the next release of the language?