INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
In addition to ventilators and face masks, US state governments are now in dire need of COBOL programmers to help out during the global
pandemic.New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy recently put out a call for volunteers who know how to code the decades-old computer programming
language as many of the state's systems are still running on older mainframes
Governor Murphy explained that many of New Jersey's systems are outdated during a coronavirus briefing, saying:"Literally, we have systems
that are 40-plus-years-old
There'll be lots of postmortems and one of them on our list will be how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL
programmers?"According to Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, the state's Departments of Labor were in the process of modernizing their systems
struggling to process its large volume of unemployment claims using a COBOL mainframe and four other separate systems
New Jersey is facing a similar situation as 362,000 of the states residents have filed for unemployment in the past two weeks and its
40-year-old mainframes are now being overloaded.COBOL, which stands for Common Business Oriented Language, was first developed back in 1959
and is surprisingly still in use today.For instance, a 2017 report from Reuters revealed that there are still 220bn lines of COBOL in use
today as 43 percent of banking systems and 95 percent of ATM swipes still rely on the aging computer programming language.COBOL is also
still used by the US federal government across a variety of agencies including the Department of Veteran Affairs, the Department of Justice
and the Social Security Administration.Additionally, a report from the inspector general for the Social Security Administration released in
2018 revealed that the administration still maintains more than 60m lines of COBOL along with millions more lines of other legacy
programming languages.If you've ever wanted to learn COBOL, now would be the perfect time to do so.Via CNBC
