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Don't Count Cobol Out
Hugh Pickens writes "Although Turing Award-winning computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said, 'the use of Cobol cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense,' Michael Swaine has an interesting entry to Dr. Dobb's Journal asserting that Cobol is the most widely used language in the 21st century, critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today, and may be the next language you'll be learning. In 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps, and billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year. Cobol is a key element in the realization of modern distributed business software architecture concepts — XML/metadata, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture — and e-business."
Dijkstra was not known for being conservative in his statements of opinion. His "GOTO considered harmful" essay did a lot of good, but it also did quite a bit of damage. To the point where we ended up with a variety of "considered Harmful" Considered Harmful essays.
(I wonder if ""Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful is soon to follow? Oh wait. That already happened in '87.)
A more conservative viewing of COBOL would show that it held a useful place in history, but is now antiquated. You'd need to be extremely conservative to think that COBOL has a place for growth in the modern world.
Oh snap. We got another one.
Let's be realistic here.
1. 1997 was 11 years ago
2. Everyone was preparing for Y2K
3. Those billions of lines of code were often replacing billions of lines of coded that were removed
As someone who once worked with mainframes, I can tell you that COBOL isn't dead. However, it's not exactly thriving, either. Legacy systems do their jobs well, so there is little reason to replace them. Instead, many companies use technologies like Java->CICS connectors to bridge the gap between old and new. But that doesn't mean that anyone is going to be developing "millions of lines of COBOL".
Quite the opposite, in fact. Business moves more quickly today than in any period in history. And with business moving so quickly, companies find they need to develop new aspects to their businesses. Those new aspects often take the form of new opportunities to develop new software.
If anything, I think COBOL is still hanging on because the mindset for technology is still external facing. Remember the Dot Com Boom? Well, one of the side effects was that technology shifted from optimizing internal operations to interacting with customers directly. Which is not a bad thing, except that internal operations shouldn't be neglected. Thus I see a lot of companies with inefficient internal procedures because they have not invested in proper internal technology infrastructure. This has left a niche where old COBOL programs are nursed along despite a growing amount of manual work for employees at many companies.
Wouldn't it be nice if technology could solve their problems? Well, it can. All we need is someone to make the investment.
With the economy going bust at the moment, I have a feeling the pendulum is going to swing back the other way. Companies are going to need to tighten their belts and become more competitive on price. Which means that they need more efficient operations. With the massive advancements in technology and ensuring code quality in the last 10 years, I fully expect that companies will soon have systems every bit as solid as their COBOL mainframes. Except they will be designed with more rapid change and flexibility in mind.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It may seem surprising that it takes any programming at all to implement a salary change in a payroll system, but a commenter on Slashdot said it was at least plausible, and that's good enough for us.
I think this alone should be enough to discredit the author.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Gov. Schwarzenegger ordered a cut in pay to California state workers, and was told that it would be impossible to implement because the payroll system is in Cobol and nobody can touch it.
Sounded like political bull to me, but then again...
and may be the next language you'll be learning
Just impossible. Basically because it was the second language (after FORTRAN) that I learned. I don't really understand the fuss about COBOL. Never found it either much worse or much better than other languages. The thing to remember about COBOL is that it was developed to solve a specific kind of problems. Today we would call it a Domain-Specific Language. And that kind of problems it solves with relative straightforwardness. Most of the critics I see of COBOL are for trying to use it as a general-purpose language. I mean, you don't try to write a text editor in PL-SQL, even if you probably could. And nobody criticizes PL-SQL for that reason.
So COBOL is outdated and verbose. True. So what. It's been years since a wrote a line of the beast, but I wouldn't have a problem to start working with it tomorrow. Also, as the set of problems that it was designed to solve was reduced, it as very pliable to being automatically generated.
So, a language is a language, all have their problems and advantages. Me, I care much more about the size of my screen or the strength of the air conditioning in my workplace than about the particular dialect that I have to program this week.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.
000300
000400*
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400 DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500 DISPLAY "NO THANKS!" LINE 15 POSITION 10.
100600 STOP RUN.
100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100800 EXIT.
Can someone give me a side-by-side example of C and Cobol program or statement to do the same thing which would illustrate why Cobol is so "evil"?
C (No bells or whistles): http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-c-116.html
COBOL (or as I call it, COBALD): http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-cobol-1820.html
What do COBOL coders make these days?
COBOL programs.
<rimshot/>
Have gnu, will travel.
In 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps, and billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year.
The report neglected to mention that 239.9 billion of those lines were boilerplate headers and math operators spelled out with English verbs.
Well, that's a matter of being in a hurry go get the program out the door. There's lots of parameter input through the compiler going on. Always has been.
I personally like terse languages, but I think coupling is a bigger issue. Fifty lines of self-contained COBOL are easier to understand than twenty lines of highly coupled Python that depends on assumptions spread far and wide in the system.
One of the reasons that so many COBOL systems remain is that they were written in a day when most tasks ran top to bottom. It was before the "event loop" became a familiar pattern to most programmers. In a sense, it shows how reusability can shoot you in the foot (there's few worthwhile tools that can't be dangerous some of the time). Back in the day the vast majority of programs had well defined input, performed a well characterized calculation on that input, and produced a well defined output. Now consider something that is a component in a framework. It has to be damn well conceived because it's meant to operate in situations the designer has never even conceived of.
So, I'll bet that the COBOL that survives is stuff which does something that is clearly defined, simple, and useful. Why convert it to Java if it works fine and is part of a large body of software that works fine?
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