Slashdot Mirror
COBOL Celebrates 50 Years
oranghutan writes "The language used to power most of the world's ATMs, COBOL, is turning 50. It also runs about 75 per cent of the world's business applications, so COBOL should be celebrated for making it to half a century. In cricketing terms, that's a good knock. The author says: 'COBOL's fate was decided during a meeting of the Short Range Committee, the organization responsible for submitting the first version of the language in 1959. The meeting was convened after a meeting at the Pentagon first laid down the guidelines for the language. Half a century later, Micro Focus published research which showed people still use COBOL at least 10 times throughout the course of an average working day in Australia. Only 18 per cent of those surveyed, however, had ever actually heard of COBOL.'"
Though, to be fair, 50 years isn't quite as long as the average cricket game.
"It also runs about 75 per cent of the world's business applications"
Gee, I didn't know Windows Apps were coded in COBOL.
Come on, 75% is a HIGHLY dubious claim. Where's the source / proof / evidence? Where I work, we have nearly 200 business apps and I'm pretty sure less than 2% of business apps were made in COBOL - possibly even 0%.
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
People "use" applications and embedded systems.
It would be more accurate to say people use applications written in the language several times a day.
I wonder how many times people use applications written in C or languages common to embedded systems? What languages, for example, are used to create the code that makes their automobiles, home entertainment centers, voicemail, etc. work?
How many times a day do people use applications that rely other languages that predate the moon landing?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Happy birthday, Crappy Old Bad Obsolete Language! You need to take better care of yourself, you look a lot older than fifty.
Free Martian Whores!
Now if that isn't a troll...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
For those of you still hanging on:
http://www.amazon.com/C-COBOL-Programmers-Business-Approach/dp/0805316604/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253538164&sr=8-1
Kriston
... and GET OFF MY LAWN!
We were taught COBOL at college 25 years ago and i'm still a grumpy old git
"COBOL Celebrates 50 Years"
Should read:
"COBOL Bemoans 50 Years"
Come on, I've teed it up for you, now knock it out of the park!
Maybe we can make a touchdown from that half-court shot, as you so nicely handicapped the goalie.
COBOL did a lot of things right, things that a lot of modern languages ignored.
Little things like:
* Having a manufacturer and machine and OS-independent standard.
* Quasi human-readable code.
* "MOVE CORRESPONDING"
that said, it's just as easy for numbskulls to write bad COBOL as to write bad C++ or bad Ruby.
Most businesses did not see any need to port mainframe stuff to WinDoze.
COBOL is solid. WinDoze is flakey. RM COBOL extended COBOL to modern
programmers. If it isn't broke, you don't 'fix' it.
Get a grip, and learn. I suggest going back to school. Just my opinion
though.
"Come on, 75% is a HIGHLY dubious claim. Where's the source / proof / evidence? Where I work, we have nearly 200 business apps and I'm pretty sure less than 2% of business apps were made in COBOL - possibly even 0%."
I suggest YOU go to work for any major business and work on their accounting software. Highly dubious? Hardly. Your business 'Apps' are probably front ends for a real language on a mainframe.
Visual this or that.
identification division.
program-id. birthday.
environment division.
data division.
procedure division.
main section.
display "get off my lawn!"
stop run.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Look, I did a class on VB in high school so I know what I'm talking about.
COBOL is so crap that you can't even create a new COBOL project in Visual Studio anymore. You really need to get up to speed.
I worked at a company that had a Cobol-based program that went live back in 1969. A team of programmers had kept it going ever since. Shortly after I started (mid 1995), I was in a meeting when one of the Cobol programmers mentioned that so-and-so had died over the weekend. Everybody started talking about her, what a great person she was, etc. After the meeting, I asked who she was, and was told that she was the last surviving member of the original team that wrote and deployed the application. When the system was finally shut down back in 2003 or so (I had long since left, but still had some contacts there to tell me what was going on), I really felt weird about hearing it; here was this thing that had outlived its creators (and some of the later maintainers), and now it was gone too.
Isn't it strange how computer software is both unbelievably ephemeral, yet also incredibly long-lived. I've worked on both sides and I'm not sure which is more fulfilling; it apparently took several years to write the aforementioned Cobol program, but it outlived its creators. I wonder what a programmer on something like, say, Madden, would feel, knowing that this thing they're working so hard on will be totally supplanted by the next version, next year.
Strange business, this computing machinery. Strange indeed.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
Edsger W.Dijkstra, 18 June 1975
Ordo Militum Unix.
How is SNOBOL doing? Better or worse than COBOL? Tim S.
and still very much alive.
You cannot kill it (quite literally, mainframes have a MTBF of what, 40 years? How is your windows box doing?).
You can sneer at it, disregard it, ridicule it. But it is still there after decades of getting bad rep and no fresh blood. That is actually pretty impressive.
http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/spring97/0143.html
Jack was a COBOL programmer in the mid to late 1990s. After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the Client/Server programmers and website developers, he was finally getting some respect. He'd become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. Several years of this relentless, mind-numbing work had taken its toll on Jack. He began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. All he could think about was how he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it. He tried getting a job with an Orange County web development firm, but couldn't hack it in the end. Jack decided to contact a company that specialized in cryogenics. He made a deal to have himself frozen until March 15th, 2000. The next thing he would know is he'd wake up in the year 2000; after the New Year celebrations and computer debacles; after the leap day. Nothing else to worry about except getting on with his life. He was put into his cryogenic receptacle, the technicians set the revive date, he was given injections to slow his heartbeat to a bare minimum, and that was that. The next thing that Jack saw was an enormous and very modern room filled with excited people. They were all shouting "I can't believe it!" and "It's a miracle" and "He's alive!". There were cameras (unlike any he'd ever seen) and equipment that looked like it came out of a science fiction movie. Someone who was obviously a spokesperson for the group stepped forward. Jack couldn't contain his enthusiasm. "Is it over?" he asked. "Is the year 2000 already here? Are all the millennial parties and promotions and crises all over and done with?" The spokesman explained that there had been a problem with the programming of the timer on Jack's cryogenic receptacle, it hadn't been year 2000 compliant. It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. Technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet. "That sounds terrific," said Jack. "But I'm curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?" "Well," said the spokesman. "The year 10000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL".
Which prick tagged this !kobol ? Does it SAY kobol anywhere in the title, summary or article ? Or is so that you can easily search for kobol later and not find this story (in which case you could have saved your typing) ? FFS. Next time there is a story about google I'm going to tag it !poodle.
Mainframe transaction platforms are rock solid - much more than one can say for most web app platforms.
So did I. Fortran was (and still is) fun, COBOL was tedious and Burroughs B3700 Assembler should have been even more so if it were not for the fact that it is that much harder to do.
It is trendy to disparage COBOL, but it was and is a very reliable and effective language for dealing with business transactions. The only times it tended to break were when the data input contained funky characters which would precipitate a "subscript out of range" error. I found the best way to prevent that was to disable the keypunch-ops' "CTRL" keys.
That assumes that programmers make well-informed, rational decisions at all times. Chuckle.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.