[dejaime]

I hate how the title says "powers the global economy" when it should be "powers banking systems". I spend a lot of money on many things, my smartphone, gsuite, slack, Netflix, Amazon, Dropbox, games, tools, hardware, and I would guess most of that stuff never touched Cobol. Meanwhile I pay 1usd monthly for my bank (which, btw already migrated). So saying it "powers the global economy" is definitely a bit of a stretch.

I am sure there's a lot of it running still, mission critical stuff, also that there are still a few teams creating new projects with it. So it is not dead by this definition. But if I'm honest, I can't name one single language that is.

[artimaeis]

When you spend the money on those things your bank or credit card merchant processes every one of those transactions. Cobol is almost always doing the day-end processing on those systems. Hence, while the products you use don't directly rely on COBOL, the fact remains that COBOL is powering the economic transactions that allow those businesses to exist currently.

[dejaime]

My point is, COBOL is responsible for a really small % of said value per value transaction between me and said services. Linux, [Oracle/My]SQL, Java, JavaScript, C, anything from router firmware to Intel cpus powering the VMs is more relevant than said COBOL code.

So saying COBOL powers the global economy is indeed a stretch. Want to say Linux powers it? True, Intel powers it? True. COBOL... not so much. Imagine rewriting every COBOL system in the world, now change that into replacing all Intel cpus, ~~SQL~~ OracleSQL or MySQL databases or Linux kernels...

Edit: saying "SQL Databases" makes as much sense as saying "procedural programming languages", updating it to make more sense

[jnty]

Hang on - how are you paying for all these services? The money will almost certainly 'touch' a legacy banking mainframe at some point.

[Nasrudith]

Why and where are you paying for your bank? Serious question I haven't seen any that do such a thing barring "low balance surcharges". Are there any benefits over one which pays you interest for your deposit?