The language that Refuses to Die

Tutorials – COBOL

Article from Issue 204/2017
Author(s):

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.

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