The COBOL Programming Course is an open source initiative that offers educational COBOL materials and hands-on experience with modern tooling.

Cool! If you like SCREAMING IN CHATS, it might be for you.

COBOL is everywhere. You have probably used an application written in COBOL today. For example, consider the following statistics:

• About 95% of ATM swipes use COBOL code.
• COBOL powers 80% of in-person transactions.
• Every day, COBOL systems handle $3 trillion in commerce.

How pervasive is COBOL? Consider these mind-boggling facts:

• Every day there are 200 times more COBOL transactions executed than there are Google searches.
• There are over 220 billion lines of COBOL programs running today, which equates to around 80% of the world’s actively used code.
• 1,500,000,000 lines of new COBOL code are written each year.

That is, 4 million lines of extremely boring COBOL code written every day.

(Jokes aside, it’s nice to have such initiatives.)