A half-century of COBOL
May 29, 2009 —
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Fifty years after its initial specifications were laid out, COBOL continues to be the language that would not die. While new COBOL projects are nearly extinct, its resilience as a maintainable, simple, English-based language has kept COBOL programs going strong, long after their initial development has finished.
For as long as there has been COBOL, there have been people saying that it was doomed. When Jan Stuart first learned the language in 1978, she was told, even then, that it was a dead language. Now retired in the UK, Stuart found herself working with the language right up until her retirement a few years ago.
“The COBOL programs are the ones that process large amounts of transactions, typically the overnight batch,” said Stuart, who wrote COBOL at a number of financial institutions. “And its usefulness is that it can process large numbers of transactions quickly in a way a lot of new languages struggle with. I think that's why a lot of financial organizations keep their old COBOL programs.”
Stuart said that one of the biggest benefits of using COBOL is its flexibility, which comes from its simplicity. “In COBOL, you can very easily map different data items in different formats. That's very useful. In the early part of the program, where you specify your variables, you can have overlapping formats so you can easily convert alpha to numeric without having to do any moves.”
She enjoyed working with COBOL for 31 years, because “it's very easy to learn," she said. "I suppose the clever part of it is the way COBOL compiles into assembler code. Some people might find that quite difficult. But it breaks right down into machine code."
Premature burial
Indeed, even before COBOL was complete, some were calling it a dead language, so much so that in the early 1960s, one angry developer bought the language a tombstone.
Howard Bromberg worked with Hopper in the early days of the language. When he began working at RCA on the implementation of COBOL, he found that the work was wildly difficult to coordinate with the central COBOL specification committee. As RCA's representative on that committee, Bromberg found himself and his team rushing to create a commercialized version of the language, often skipping ahead of the specification committee. He felt that this was an untenable position, compounded by RCA's business desires and the COBOL committee's lack of speed.
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