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I have seen the future, and it is COBOL?

by Sam Mikes
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March 26, 2001, 06:27 PM —  LinuxWorld.com — 


Let me tell you about a hot Web scripting language. It's been ported to almost every computer architecture ever made; its speed and readability are legendary. It's known to be good with databases. Some people swear by it, some people swear at it, but it's a force to be reckoned with, and it's coming to your desktop. It's COBOL.



I must admit that when this email crossed my desk, I was inclined to think it was a joke. After checking the calendar (no, it wasn't April Fools' Day) and the company's Web site, I was convinced it was real, and I became intrigued with Deskware's CobolScript.



For while the elders of the hacking world have nothing but scorn for COBOL, I'm one of those who grew up reading the Jargon File rather than living it. I must confess now to a secret desire to know what COBOL is like ... to program in APL ... to learn Ada! My Y2K experience has slaked my thirst for this knowledge in small part, but it has (un)fortunately been limited to DEC FORTRAN with light PDP/11 macro assembler. I've had no experience with COBOL.

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So I recognized that this was my big chance to discover the truth of Edsger W. Dijkstra's oft-quoted fortune:




The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.



COBOL's wordiness is legendary: they say it has more lines of source code than generated machine instructions. Like FORTRAN, it's designed to be read in on 80-column cards. It has a built-in function for calculating the present value of an investment, but no variable scope. Thinking about programming in COBOL gives me the same feeling as thinking about the joke language INTERCAL: entering a world where any minor achievement -- like adding two integers -- has hack value because it is so difficult to do.


Why CobolScript



Not everyone is like me, of course -- most people's interest in COBOL is less frivolous. It may come as a surprise to some of you, but the COBOL market is not small. In fact, Matt Dean, the president and CEO of Deskware, estimates that as many as 2.5 million programmers have primary skills in COBOL. That's a lot of programmer training potentially going to waste in these days of computing languages with beans. A job market as tight as IT is today can't afford to waste that much talent.


COBOL programmers are habitually undervalued by management. The general attitude seems to be that they're old, and expensive: it would be better if they just disappeared. Although COBOL is enjoying a brief resurgence as a result of Y2K conversions (did you expect to see COBOL for Dummies

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