Happy 50th Birthday to COBOL

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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Yep, COBOL is still around and it just celebrated its 50th birthday. Common Business-Oriented Language has several anniversaries that people debate as the official birthday and the one on 9/18 celebrates the anniversary of the name. And really, that which we call a COBOL by any other name would execute as leet. (Ok, that was a stretch…)

According to November 2008 stats from Datamonitor, the world is still running 200 billion lines of COBOL code and about 5 billion lines are added to live systems every year. Believe it or not, between 1.5 and 2 million developers are still working with the 50-year-old programming language.
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My first year of vo-tech back in high-school was the transition year for them going from a COBOL on a mainframe to C++ on HP desktops.
 
I took 2 semesters of COBOL in college.... It is good for what it was made for... but very easy to be buggy and it is confusing to learn.... and a woman came up with it.... go figure.

The newest revision that I am aware of is from 2005. A lot was changed and it is supposed to be more Object Oriented.
 
C++ is about half the age of Cobol. It's getting old. (1983-2009 = 26 years)
Java is about half the age of C++ (1995-2009 = 14 years)
C# is a bit more than half the age of Java. (2001-2009 = 8 years)

Interesting stuff!
 
Of those 1.5 million to 2 million COBOL developers, how many of them are less than 50 years of age? :p
 
I programmed in it for roughly 6-7 years. It paid the bills nicely, thank you very much.

Moved from a mainframe platform around '90-'91 to using it on the PC (MicroFocus COBOL).
 
Back when I first started programming (1968) I did some COBOL programming, but I was never a real fan of it. I much preferred to write in Basic Assembler Language, or RPG.

COBOL was just so 'wordy'. Granted, it was pretty much 'self documenting', but if you were working on a main frame what didn't have a lot of core memory, and a couple of IBM 360 mos 20s I worked with only had 8K of core memory, BAL made for object programs that were a lot leaner, and ran faster.

COBOL's main advantage was/is that it's cross platform. If your company went from an IBM mainfraim, to say a Honneywell, RCA, Burroughs or NCR mainframe, your COBOL programs would work with only a minor change in the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION, and a compile on the new system.
 
siliconnerd said:
Of those 1.5 million to 2 million COBOL developers, how many of them are less than 50 years of age? :p
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Sadly at the large IT shops there are still plenty of young people programming in legacy systems. I'm 27 and write in PL/1 for a large insurance company, which still has most of its systems in legacy(split between pl/1 and cobol). I know for a fact that our competitors and a few other fortune 50 companies have lots of legacy going on.

You cannot beat COBOL/PL-1 for batch processing efficiency/speed.
 
Cobol makes my eye bleed everytime I see code for it.
Other than that, Kudos to Grace Hopper for designing the worlds oldest still in use programming language.
 
Stupid COBOL. That's the only class I ever got a F in (was too late in the semester to withdraw) at my community college. The idiotic thing was the degree I took it for was dropped and they stopped offering the class so there was no way I could re-take it to salvage my GPA. I politely told the head of the computer department this and asked him to expunge it from my records but the bastard denied my request.
 
Cyrilix said:
C++ is about half the age of Cobol. It's getting old. (1983-2009 = 26 years)
Java is about half the age of C++ (1995-2009 = 14 years)
C# is a bit more than half the age of Java. (2001-2009 = 8 years)

Interesting stuff!
Click to expand...

How about compared to PASCAL, FORTRAN and BASIC?
 
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