Does Cobol exist?

• Authors: F. P. Coyle
• Venue: IEEE Software
• Year: 2000

At first glance, asking whether Cobol exists might seem like a ploy, a setup for describing how the billions of lines of Cobol in the world are responsible for almost every facet of daily life: from paychecks and utility bills to the entire computer based corporate infrastructure. Yet, although thousands of Cobol programmers are alive and well, keeping the wheels of commerce turning, there is a large contingent in the software world for whom Cobol does not exist. Academia barely teaches it, Java and C programmers ignore it, and many look with disdain both at Cobol and the lowly Cobol programmer toiling away at mundane data processing tasks. The irony is that more than the Java, C, or language-of-the-month programmers, Cobol programmers understand data, and in case you haven't noticed, data is back. Not that data ever went away. It's still the driving force behind most of the applications we write. It's just that the Internet has forced the data issue: how to integrate and move data across platforms, build data warehouses and repositories for data mining and e-commerce, and share data and maintain semantics. These are hard problems; ones that Cobol and Cobol programmers have been wrestling with since the 1960s. Now that we perceive data as being “hot”, Cobol is taking on a new lustre and even getting a second look, especially given the notoriously poor data handling capabilities of “cooler” languages such as C, C++, and Java