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Smithsonian Celebrates 50 Years of COBOL

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the actually-it-is-your-dads-language dept.

wiredog writes "The Atlantic reports the news that the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has a new section of their website dedicated to documenting COBOL's history. An exhibit will open at the museum this spring."

35 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Museum Fight! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Funny

    Under cover of darkness, employees of the Museum of Natural history broke in and appropriated the exhibit to add to their world-renowned dinosaur collection...

    1. Re:Museum Fight! by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

      30 years from now, it will be PERL. With turtles, all the way down!

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:Museum Fight! by Ukab+the+Great · · Score: 4, Funny

      The following week Ben Stiller broke into the Museum of Natural History and the museum's computers started having Y2K problems when the 50 year-old COBOL exhibit came to life.

    3. Re:Museum Fight! by Crudely_Indecent · · Score: 2

      These dinosaurs aren't extinct though.

      Banks still use COBOL heavily.

      COBOL was my first language, so I have a soft spot for it.

      --


      "Lame" - Galaxar
    4. Re:Museum Fight! by sycodon · · Score: 2, Informative

      COBOL excels at moving data from file to file. I haven't seen the Redefines capability in any other language and is very very powerful when it comes to slicing up data before transformation and then putting it back together in other formats.

      Of course, nothing can touch the combination of mainframes and COBOL when it comes to processing millions and millions of records.

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    5. Re:Museum Fight! by mcgrew · · Score: 2

      COBOL -- Crappy Old Bad Obsolete Language

      But, it IS a dinasaur. It was one of the very first computer languages there were. It was a milestone in computing history. From the Yale page about Grace Hopper:

      Pursuing her belief that computer programs could be written in English, Admiral hopper moved forward with the development for Univac of the B-O compiler, later known as FLOW-MATIC. It was designed to translate a language that could be used for typical business tasks like automatic billing and payroll calculation. Using FLOW-MATIC, Admiral Hopper and her staff were able to make the UNIVAC I and II "understand" twenty statements in English. When she recommended that an entire programming language be developed using English words, however, she "was told very quickly that [she] couldn't do this because computers didn't understand English." It was three years before her idea was finally accepted; she published her first compiler paper in 1952.

      Admiral Hopper actively participated in the first meetings to formulate specifications for a common business language. She was one of the two technical advisers to the resulting CODASYL Executive Committee, and several of her staff were members of the CODASYL Short Range Committee to define the basic COBOL language design. The design was greatly influenced by FLOW-MATIC. As one member of the Short Range Committee stated, "[FLOW-MATIC] was the only business-oriented programming language in use at the time COBOL development started... Without FLOW-MATIC we probably never would have had a COBOL." The first COBOL specifications appeared in 1959.

      Admiral Hopper devoted much time to convincing business managers that English language compilers such as FLOW-MATIC and COBOL were feasible. She participated in a public demonstration by Sperry Corporation and RCA of COBOL compilers and the machine independence they provided. After her brief retirement from the Navy, Admiral Hopper led an effort to standardize COBOL and to persuade the entire Navy to use this high-level computer language. With her technical skills, she lead her team to develop useful COBOL manuals and tools. With her speaking skills, she convinced managers that they should learn to use them.

      Another major effort in Admiral Hopper's life was the standardization of compilers. Under her direction, the Navy developed a set of programs and procedures for validating COBOL compilers. This concept of validation has had widespread impact on other programming languages and organizations; it eventually led to national and international standards and validation facilities for most programming languages.

      From wikipedia:

      In the spring of 1959 a two day conference known as the CODASYL brought together computer experts from industry and government. Hopper served as the technical consultant to the committee, and many of her former employees served on the short-term committee that defined the new language, COBOL. The new language extended Hopper's FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas from the IBM equivalent, the COMTRAN. Hopper's belief that programs should be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or languages close to machine code (such as assembly language) was captured in the new business language, and COBOL would go on to be the most ubiquitous business language to date.[10]

      From 1967 to 1977, Hopper served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy's Office of Information Systems Planning and was promoted to the rank of Captain in 1973.[9] She developed validation software for the programming language COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy

      --
      Free Martian Whores!
    6. Re:Museum Fight! by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2

      Of course, nothing can touch the combination of mainframes and COBOL when it comes to processing millions and millions of records.

      That sounds kind of like Dr. Evil:

      "My mainframe computer is so powerful, it can process ... MILLIONS of records! Hahaha!"

    7. Re:Museum Fight! by kat_skan · · Score: 2

      With turtles, all the way down!

      That's LOGO. Perl would be camels I think.

  2. Yeah, well... by fade · · Score: 4, Funny

    When I read the headline, my head parsed "Smithsonian celebrates 150 Years of COBOL" ... but I guess that's just because when it's COBOL, it only feels like 150 years.

  3. Exhibit will have a strange layout... by SomeoneGotMyNick · · Score: 4, Funny

    There will not be a single dedicated area to show off the exhibit. Instead, the exhibit will be scattered about in separate rooms called copybooks.

  4. Hopefully there's enough room... by forkfail · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... in the Paleontology area.

    --
    Check your premises.
  5. Re:Oh My... by Xiph · · Score: 3

    Completely Obsolete Boring Old Language

    --
    Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
  6. Good Times by Bucc5062 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It may be crass to admit, but I had some great experiences working in my first COBOL position. Sure it dates me...so what, I got a lawn and am proud of it. I do appreciate the development tools I use as a current developer, but something about the simplicity, and the structure make me feel nostalgic. Lately I see code with no documentation, no good structure and buggy. COBOL, FORTRAN, and Pascal separated IT programmers (and staff) from middle managers and office workers that today think writing an Access VBA makes them a .net developer. You can't go back (nor would I, but for the need of a job), yet I would like to see some of the foundations that went into development groups make a comeback.

    --
    Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
  7. Re:Along with other disasters? by smooth+wombat · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hey! Three Mile Island was not a disaster. It was a boon to those of us living nearby as our electric bills plunged because we no longer had to turn on our lights at night.

    --
    We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
  8. I thought COBOL basically died after Y2K. by mark-t · · Score: 2

    I remember seeing ads for COBOL programmers in the careers section of the paper throughout the 1990's... with steadily increasing salary ranges, right up until about mid-October of 1999, where I was routinely seeing offers 80K per year or sometimes even more for new grads, it seemed that there were quite a few companies getting desperate to have COBOL programmers.

    Then, suddenly, within the space of only a week or two, the COBOL programmer ads stopped.

    By November, every last one of them was gone.

    I never saw another COBOL programmer wanted ad after that. Ever.

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    1. Re:I thought COBOL basically died after Y2K. by ledow · · Score: 3, Informative

      Because, once the Y2K bug was fixed, those systems that were already probably working just fine with 20-30 years of minimal maintenance and one huge spurge of Y2K updates will carry on running, most probably. Or people took it as a sign that maybe it's *not* a good idea to be relying on code that nobody on your staff can understand in order to run your business.

      See what happens come 2038. That'll be the interesting bit.

    2. Re:I thought COBOL basically died after Y2K. by cje · · Score: 5, Funny

      There was once a COBOL programmer in the mid to late 1990s. For the sake of this story, we'll call him Jack. After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, Jack was finally getting some respect. He'd become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments for prestige companies, traveling all over the world on different assignments. He was working 70 and 80 and even 90 hour weeks, but it was worth it.

      Several years of this relentless, mind-numbing work had taken its toll on Jack. He had problems sleeping and began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. It had reached a point where even the thought of the year 2000 made him nearly violent. He must have suffered some sort of breakdown, because all he could think about was how he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it.

      Jack decided to contact a company that specialized in cryogenics. He made a deal to have himself frozen until March 15th, 2000. This was a very expensive process and totally automated. He was thrilled. 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. "It is over?" he asked. "Is 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. But the spokesman told Jack that he shouldn't get excited; someone important wanted to speak to him.

      Suddenly a wall-sized projection screen displayed the image of a man that looked very much like Bill Gates. This man was Prime Minister of Earth. He told Jack not to be upset. That this was a wonderful time to be alive. That there was world peace and no more starvation. That the space program had been reinstated and there were colonies on the moon and on Mars. That technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet, or to watch any entertainment, or to hear any music recorded anywhere.

      "That sounds terrific," said Jack. "But I'm curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?"

      "Well," said the Prime Minister. "The year 10000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL".

      (copypasta)

      --
      We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
    3. Re:I thought COBOL basically died after Y2K. by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Now COBOL is basically used in years-old legacy code which is held together by the programming equivalent of duct tape. And nobody wants to touch that mess. Oh no.

      While that's likely true, it's hardly unique to COBOL.

      Any codebase which is over, say, 5 years or more, is likely creaking under its own weight and nobody really knows how all of the parts work anymore.

      The software also likely runs day in, day out, 365 days/year, and does everything it has been developed to do. I've seen projects that try to replace such legacy systems -- after you've spent millions trying to write something new which does most of what you need, you discover that there's huge gaping holes in your coverage, and you're nowhere near where you'd need to be to replace it. Often, the project gets scrapped at that point as people realize you're never going to be a viable replacement.

      Hell, I knew a guy in the 90s who was retired from a company, and drawing his full pension, and working as a consultant at big $$$ rates to maintain the stuff he did before he got paid. All said and done, he was making about 4x in retirement what he made before he retired. They simply had no other people who could have possibly had the 30 years of experience he had on this mammoth system which ran on mainframes.

      Trying to get rid of that old creaky legacy code is nigh on impossible in some cases.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    4. Re:I thought COBOL basically died after Y2K. by ziggyzaggy · · Score: 3, Informative

      You're not looking in the right places, here's 4,500 COBOL jobs http://www.indeed.com/q-Cobol-jobs.html . Major city newspapers list them also. Latest COBOL is COBOL 2002, which includes object orientation (already de facto standard since early 90s by the major compiler vendors), web and XML extensions, locale sensitive processing, cobol javabeans. The next version is shaping up already, dynamic tables, structured constants, ISO 8601:2000 dates. Propose new extensions for the next version of COBOL include aspect oriented programming. So, it's still a living growing language, and its main application is hardcore money moving and logistics in highly available fault tolerant systems with uptimes of decade or more.

    5. Re:I thought COBOL basically died after Y2K. by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's not impossible, it's just expencive

      A high enough threshold for expensive can make for impossible.

      and the low bid was probably made by some young programmer who doesn't apriciate the scope of the project

      Not hardly. This was several senior people on both sides all trying to capture requirements and understand the scope. By necessity, their own senior people had to limit the scope of the initial project.

      Over time, however, you discover everything that the legacy software does ... and frequently discover that half of what they told you about the system is utterly false, and the other half was woefully incomplete. So, everything you've built in that depends on your understanding of uniqueness, scope, and content ... well, suddenly none of that is true (and quite possibly never was across the whole system).

      The trick is getting managment on the ball enopugh to identify people able to complete the project and willing to pay them, in spite of the fact that some other firm gave a lower quote.

      I question if you've been involved in replacing a legacy application with 30+ years of history and data in it.

      This isn't about people not being on board, or some lame-ass low bid by someone who didn't understand what they'd gotten into. Some of these systems have effectively been built up iteratively over decades, and are business critical. Replacing them can be completely non-trivial ... and, in some cases, almost insurmountable without massive investments.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  9. Re:Oh My... by CyberDong · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Dear God, I'm old.

  10. Laugh it up, kids! by ewg · · Score: 3, Funny

    Laugh it up, kids! Your favorite language is next.

    --
    org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
    1. Re:Laugh it up, kids! by damien_kane · · Score: 2

      J2EE certainly is the COBOL of the OO world. Just as Perl 5 is the COBOL of scripting languages.

      I thought that ooCOBOL is the COBOL of the OO world...

  11. "Celebrates"? by Haedrian · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is "Celebrates" the correct word to use in this context?

    1. Re:"Celebrates"? by westlake · · Score: 4, Informative

      Is "Celebrates" the correct word to use in this context?

      Yes.

      It is 1960 and your Fortune 500 clients want programs they can read.

      Programs they can trust.

      Their area of expertise is corporate accounting, business methods and procedures.

      Practices which have evolved over hundreds of years and practices which the newly minted mainframe programmer is not going to master overnight.

      COBOL syntax has often been criticized for its verbosity. However, proponents are quick to note that this was an intentional part of the language design and considered by many to be one of the COBOL's strengths. One of the design goals of COBOL was for COBOL code to be readable and understandable to non-programmers such as managers, supervisors and users. This is why COBOL has a very English-like syntax and structural elements--including: nouns, verbs, clauses, sentences, sections, and divisions.
      Consequently, COBOL is considered by at least one source to be "the most readable, understandable and self-documenting programming language in use today...." Not only does this readability generally assist the maintenance process but the older a program gets the more valuable this readability becomes."
      Additionally, traditional COBOL is a simple language with a limited scope of function (with no pointers, no user-defined types, and no user-defined functions), encouraging a straightforward coding style. This has made it well-suited to its primary domain of business computing--where the program complexity lies in the business rules that need to be encoded rather than sophisticated algorithms or data structures. And because the standard does not belong to any particular vendor, programs written in COBOL are highly portable. The language can be used on a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. And the rigid hierarchical structure restricts the definition of external references to the Environment Division, which simplifies platform changes.       COBOL

  12. Sweet by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Funny

    They also announced a COBOL App Store so users could easily find and install useful applications. The inaugural app was "Angry Birds" for the Honeywell 200. Ordering this app will have a box with the punch cards delivered to your house, and a complete installation manual. The second offering was a fart app for the UNIVAC series.

  13. Re:Along with other disasters? by Tr3vin · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, but you guys are a real distraction at movie theaters.

  14. Re:Along with other disasters? by mswhippingboy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Disaster? Hardly. Let's see where "insert your favorite language here" is after 50 years.

    A recent Gartner study found COBOL in about 75% of enterprise business processes still today. There are an estimated 200 billion lines of COBOL still in use today (at least as late as 2004), with around 2 billion new lines being added each year.

    There is considerable controversy about the accuracy of the 200 billion lines, but nonetheless, I would hardly classify this kind of success as a disaster.

    --
    Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
  15. Re:Fortune by Shadow99_1 · · Score: 2

    Really COBOL, in the last iteration I worked with it in at least, had 'caught up' with the times in alot of ways. 10 years ago I learned OO COBOL, which really made COBOL alot like C++. Though COBOL was sort of limited in IO: files, text to screen, and at most pixel switching for primitive graphics. No fancy GUI's here. Most of COBOL though was about file interaction, bring stuff in, work on it, and output once more. Sometimes with user input, though often not.

    --
    we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
  16. Re:Along with other disasters? by JockTroll · · Score: 2

    Not to mention that, beside the glow, you leave toxic goo everywhere and we just hate the way you eat popcorn with your tentacles.

    --
    Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
  17. Thus spake the master programmer by thodelu · · Score: 4, Funny

    In The Tao of Programming: The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.

  18. Mainframes = Non-disposable code by xanthos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, it is real easy to get all snarky about COBOL. I have always hated it even though it was a popular language when I was in school (late 70's). My CS department had three separate non-overlapping courses you could take.

    The thing is that just about any programmer, even if they don't know COBOL, could go in and change it. COBOL is readable. The record based functionality is simple to comprehend. Something written 30 years ago is still running because there is nothing wrong with it. It does what its supposed to do. It was the perfect solution to the most important business problems of its day, and that legacy is why it is still around while other languages of its era are not.

    Should new programs be written in it? HELL NO!!!! The problem set to which COBOL applies is pretty well solved. The new problems require new solutions.

    -Xanthos

    --
    Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
    1. Re:Mainframes = Non-disposable code by LordRobin · · Score: 2

      Well, gee... I must be imagining the over 100 new COBOL programs I've written over the past seven years. You see, I do this for a living, and make a pretty decent living at that. I work for an insurance company. The policy and billing management systems are implemented in COBOL on an IBM mainframe, and if we want to keep pace with our competitors, new development is essential. Recently we upgraded the web interface external clients use to access our billing data. While that involved a lot of web design and Java programming, at its core was a set of brand new COBOL programs that fetch the data from the legacy system. (And send it back as XML. Yeah, COBOL can do that.)

      I graduated from college in 1989, and didn't study COBOL because everyone told me it was a dead language. When I entered the job market in 1991, every job opening I found required COBOL experience. I was lucky to get a job with a consulting outfit that was willing to train me, and that was the beginning of an 18-year career programming COBOL, CICS, and occasionally DB2. Throughout that career, I would hear again and again that COBOL was a dinosaur language and was going away. Meanwhile, I continued to design and code new programs and systems in this supposedly dead language.

      So you'll have to forgive me if I don't worry too much about the "death" of COBOL.

      ------RM

  19. Don't forget about Admiral Hopper by wandazulu · · Score: 2

    Cobol might be a pretty easy joke for obsolescence, but remember that Cobol was written by a woman in a time where the industry was far more male dominated than it is today.

    Though I've never programmed in Cobol, it made a big impression on me as a kid to show that anybody could program a computer, or use a computer to create something cool.

  20. OO COBOL by tm2b · · Score: 2

    Did they talk about the object-oriented version of COBOL? It's named ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL.

    --
    "It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny