COBOL Will Live Forever

Authors Jason Self

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COBOL Will Live Forever Home

The COBOL programming language is one of the oldest computer languages in Linux-libre
existence, yet it's still widely used in extremely significant ways: The average person
on the street has nearly a hundred interactions per week with things running COBOL.
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Even the New York Stock Exchange currently uses numerous mainframe computers
running COBOL programs (although various efforts are presently underway to reduce
that); and the number of daily COBOL transactions made around the world each day How To
is actually greater than the number of hits all of the websites on the Internet receive.
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COBOL is an acronym that stands for "Common Business Oriented Language" and it
was created in 1959 by a group of programmers known as the "Conference on Data RSS Feed
Systems Languages." In the late 50s, the Department of Defense requested that a
business language be created so certain features of businesses could be automated,
and by 1960 the COBOL-60 language was released to the public. By 1965 COBOL
About Me
had become highly popular and was in widespread use, but due to radical
modifications of the language by various companies over the years, COBOL had to be Contact Me
made more compatible between various machines and so the American National
Standards Institute stepped in to create a standardized version in 1968, which is now GPL enforced
known as ANS-COBOL (American National Standard COBOL). The ANSI institute has
since made more modifications to the standardized version of COBOL, primarily
If you appreciate any of the things I
releasing an object-oriented version for modernization purposes.
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A woman by the name of Grace Hopper was largely responsible for the development
of COBOL. Grace Hopper was a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy and also a
pioneer in the field of computer science. She designed the first ever compiler for a
programming language and is now known as the Grandmother of COBOL. In 1949
she joined a computer corporation called Eckert-Mauchly and initially worked as a
research mathematician, but soon she was helping develop the UNIVAC I computer.
After the Remington Rand corporation took over the company, Admiral Hopper began
writing compilers. Her first compiler was known as the "A-0" and others such as
MATH-MATIC, ARITH-MATIC, and FLOW-MATIC compilers soon followed. When she
began working on the COBOL language, it was primarily a combination of her FLOW-
MATIC compiler and an IBM language called COMTRAN. Admiral Hopper was the first
person to realize computer languages should be closer to English language
instructions for readability and to speed up coding time, rather than using opaque and
tedious machine code (1s and 0s that the central processing unit can understand). For
over ten years Admiral Hopper was the main director of the Navy Programming
Languages Group and in 1969 she was named "man of the year" by the Data
Processing Management Association. In 1991 she was given the prestigious National
Medal of Technology. Grace Hopper's motto was always, "It's easier to ask
forgiveness than it is to get permission."

COBOL has been around for so long many people associate it with old mainframe
computers, fluorescent green computer screens, core dumps, and obsolete
technology, but COBOL still retains many advantages for solving business related
problems and has been highly modernized since 1959. COBOL is a solid dependable
language that relies on useful batch-processing functions and due to COBOL's long
variable names it is basically "self-documenting," which is highly useful for
programmers. Despite news articles occasionally announcing the death of COBOL, it
is still ideal for accounting and business transactions and it won't be going away
anytime soon.

Traditional COBOL code is characterized by long variable names being written in all
capital letters. Here is an example of a very brief COBOL program:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. ShortProgram.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DisplayPrompt.
DISPLAY "Hello, World!"
STOP RUN.

There are certain drawbacks to COBOL as a programming language (it's not
particularly suited to interactive or World Wide Web applications, for example) but
mainly it suffers from extreme disrespect by software developers since they see it as
being a nearly obsolete language. Many programmers wouldn't be caught dead
composing a line of COBOL code or even using a COBOL compiler since they view it
as harking back to the Dark Ages of computer technology and development.
Nevertheless many COBOL programmers are needed by reputable companies to
maintain existing code and even extend it in some cases. Computer Science
departments also see COBOL as outdated and inferior when compared to more
modern software languages and rarely offer COBOL classes. But if you are a
programmer looking for a job, you should realize that a huge amount of COBOL code
has been written since 1959 and programmers are desperately needed to maintain
and even add to what is presently in use. Numerous financial institutions and stock
companies use COBOL daily and most companies don't want the high costs involved
with re-platforming their old programs and would much rather hire legitimate COBOL
programmers to maintain what they already have (experts estimate roughly 250 billion
COBOL source code lines are in use today; and about 15 billion lines are added each
year! Furthermore, about seventy percent of ALL transactional systems around the
world are written in the COBOL language.)

Still COBOL programmers are rather hard to find and many companies are searching
for them right now. So if you are a programmer and would like to have more job
security, make plans to get some COBOL training as soon as possible. COBOL will
live forever.