COBOL

COBOL, an acronym for Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the world's first programming languages, and one of the most English-like programming languages even to this day. Invented in 1959, COBOL is still used in business to this day, especially in the world of mainframe computers, often found at large banks, the Social Security Administration, and unemployment offices. Few new professional programs are written in COBOL these days, but COBOL programmers continue to maintain legacy systems.

History

In 1959, CODASYL, the Conference on Data Systems Languages, started creating a programming language that was more appealing to businesspeople, while most programming languages, such as Fortran, were more appealing to computer scientists and mathematicians. COBOL became popular in business rather quickly, due to the code being written in an extremely English-like syntax. Several major revisions of COBOL have occurred over the years, including COBOL 1974, COBOL 1985, COBOL 2002, COBOL 2014, and the currently still unimplemented COBOL 2023.

Programming style

Being a business-oriented language designed for all people in business to understand, COBOL resembles English more than any other programming language, even today. While most programming languages feature parentheses, brackets and braces, COBOL only uses such symbols, notably the brackets, in very specific cases, so the procedure division of a program often does not have any brackets at all, with only some brackets here and there in the data division, where variables are created. Unlike most programming languages, where statements end with a semicolon or no punctuation at all, statements of COBOL code are called sentences and end in periods just like in many written languages. The labels in COBOL are called paragraphs, and the reserved words are called verbs. COBOL is traditionally indented in a very specific way, and some compilers strictly enforce this, or have a free format mode that can be enabled or disabled; COBOL started out in the era of punched cards, so all lines were numbered, all paragraphs and divisions started in column 8, and all sentences started in column 12. Lines of code ended in column 72, though often a modification date or other identifier was written from columns 73 to 80; in many compilers, code can not be written in columns 73 through 80. Modern compilers in free format mode do not have these rules, and code can start in column 1 or any other column, line numbers can be skipped, and code can even be written in lowercase, though many examples in modern COBOL books still use capital letter commands even when indentation and line numbers are not used.

Modern usage

In April 2020, when a large number of people filed for unemployment following COVID-19, the computers at various unemployment offices could not handle all the incoming claims, and a call for COBOL programmers was sent out; famously the governor of New Jersey at the time put out a request for COBOL programmers, and a famous news clip of said governor mispronouncing COBOL as "cobalt" became somewhat popular, mostly through an NPR news story in which the governor's pronunciation was corrected by the NPR host. In the years since, several businesses have attempted to get away from COBOL and onto modern languages like Java and Python, but often these businesses found it more affordable to just have their code maintained rather than be rewritten. IBM is attempting to have artificial intelligence tools rewrite frequently-used COBOL programs in Java, though it is uncertain how many COBOL legacy systems will still exist. The Texas-based company COBOL Cowboys is a group of COBOL programmers, mostly senior engineers who knew the language when it was more popular, who are often hired to maintain legacy COBOL programs.