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Smithsonian Celebrates 50 Years of COBOL
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."
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.
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.
... in the Paleontology area.
Check your premises.
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
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.
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
Yeah, but you guys are a real distraction at movie theaters.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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