The language that Refuses to Die
Tutorials – COBOL
Despite being more than half a century old, COBOL is still in use. Explore this fascinating old-school language and see how it ticks.
New programming languages pop up all the time. In recent years, there's been plenty of hype around Rust, Go, Swift, Clojure, and many others – and often for good reason. These languages have their own plus points and useful features, and many of them are maturing well. Despite hyperbolic claims from certain overzealous fans, however, none of these languages are going to replace C, C++, or Java completely any time soon. Sure, those languages are old and have their limitations, but they're extremely well established, and rewriting large codebases in the current hot language du jour is a mammoth task.
Although C dates back to the early 1970s, there's an even older language that's still in use – albeit to a much lesser extent. COBOL, the common business-oriented language, was created in 1959 by the US Department of Defense (Figure 1) as a portable language that could be used to process data across many different machines and architectures. The language was standardized a few years later, although there are many different dialects. The most recent update to the language specification was COBOL 2014.
Figure 1: US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper had a huge influence on modern computing and helped create COBOL.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.