COBOL?
COBOL? Sounds familiar, but you can’t put your finger on it? No worries. You probably, like most of us, have seen it hit the headlines, which is an unusual thing for a programming language. Especially for one, which is almost as old as my grandfather.
I, personally, didn’t even know of its existence until some weeks ago. As it made the headlines, I wanted to check it out. Finding the reason it became such popular worth learning about, I thought, writing about what I know would be acting to yours and my mutual advantage. Me, getting the chance of explaining it in this blog post; you, reading it and having a little grasp of this headline-making language, COBOL.
I am, briefly, planning to touch on these:
- What is COBOL?
- What made it gain popularity?
- Is COBOL to blame?
1. What is COBOL?
First things first, let’s define COBOL.
COBOL: /koh�bol/, n.
[COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with evil.)
A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by code grinders to do boring mindless things on dinosaur mainframes. See also fear and loathing, software rot.
-The Jargon File
Nah. Just kidding.
COBOL is a high-level and imperative language that was developed in 1959 before the internet was invented. It is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems.
2. What made it gain popularity?
As the COVID-19 outbreak is nowhere close to the end, besides, keeps spreading, every aspect of life has been affected. Rapidly increasing unemployment is one of them. Since national emergency was declared, more than 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment aid.
CARES Act, a $2 trillion economic relief package, which was passed on March 27th, includes a $600 weekly increase in unemployment benefits. State agencies need to fix unemployment insurance systems, which runs on COBOL, to distribute that money.
This is why New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called out for COBOL experts to handle a massive surge of applicants for unemployment insurance. Yet, it is not easy to find COBOL programmers as nowadays, most of the programmers prefer more contemporary languages.
3. Is COBOL to blame?
People are making fun of COBOL being antique. No matter how old COBOL is, it moved up with changes. The program persists in systems. Stuart McGill, chief technology officer and general manager of Borland for Micro Focus says:
“Believe it or not, it’s probably easier to move COBOL into the cloud, than it is to move a C/C++ application into the cloud. It’s certainly easier to a COBOL application to the cloud, particularly from a mainframe environment than a client-server, and Microsoft-based client-server [environment]”.
Although the popularity of COBOL has fallen dramatically in the last three decades, there are 220 billion lines of code written in COBOL, which are still in use. Forty-three percent of banking systems are built on COBOL, %80 of in-person transactions use COBOL, and 95% percent of ATM swipes rely on COBOL code.
The problem is not that COBOL, an ancient programming language, is still in use. It’s instead that there is a lack of COBOL programmers.
COBOL is a programming language that has been used throughout the 60s, 70s, and even into the 80s; accordingly, COBOL programmers are way older than the average age of coders. With the lapse of time, they have moved away from the aging language. That, now, makes it harder to find experts in COBOL.
Thus, a 75-year-old programmer, Bill Hinshaw, launched a new company called COBOL Cowboys, which connects companies to COBOL programmers.
Hoping that they’ll find a way to solve this COBOL crisis as soon as possible, I am ending my blog post here. I believe I could give you a glimpse of the topic. Thank you for reading it up until here!
