COBOL, an acronym for “Common business-oriented language,” seemed like rocket science when I first learned it, but frankly, Jimmy Carter was president. Today, many a young techie looks down at the code as if you were talking about Greek or Latin.
This article from DataCenter Knowledge offers a different opinion. In fact, the article mentions that COBOL is a foundational component of credit cards today.
- In April 2020, when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced that the state desperately needed volunteers with COBOL skills, the announcement raised many eyebrows. The state’s unemployment insurance system got overwhelmed by a surge of COVID-19-related unemployment claims, creating a backlog in processing cases. It ran 40-year-old COBOL applications, and there weren’t enough people familiar with what most assumed was an antiquated programming language.
- The fact that the system was running apps written in COBOL eclipsed the late unemployment payments in news accounts. IT workers saw it as yet another sign of America’s deteriorating infrastructure. To people unfamiliar with the ins and outs of mainframe computing, COBOL was something from the age of the dinosaurs.
The reason behind New Jersey’s issue: No Programmers! Have they all moved to Florida?
- In April 2020, when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced that the state desperately needed volunteers with COBOL skills, the announcement raised many eyebrows. The state’s unemployment insurance system got overwhelmed by a surge of COVID-19-related unemployment claims, creating a backlog in processing cases. It ran 40-year-old COBOL applications, and there weren’t enough people familiar with what most assumed was an antiquated programming language.
- The press echoed the sentiment, reporting that not only was COBOL pretty much a dead programming language but that COBOL programmers were a scarcity because there weren’t many still alive who had experience with it.
- But COBOL is far from being dead, and not just because it runs some old state-government system. If not today, chances are you’ve used a COBOL-powered system at least in the last few days.
The Garden State, Home of Princeton and Rutgers, lacks COBOL Coders? Back in the Day, Citi flew in COBOL coders from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls in the 1980s!
- As for the shortage of programmers that were part of the story, that’s not exactly true either.
- According to Seay, Governor Murphy’s problem wasn’t a lack of people with COBOL skills, but a lack of COBOL programmers in New Jersey where they were needed.
- Not so, says Cameron Seay, who teaches COBOL at East Carolina University in North Carolina and co-chairs the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Working Group.
- “It looks like there are about a billion lines a year of new COBOL code being written,” he told DCK. “So yeah, while they are maintaining existing programs, there’s still a lot of COBOL development underway. Quite a bit of it.”
Even IBM relies on COBOL, Both IBM and COBOL are alive and well.
- “These legacy programs are in constant need of updating and refreshing and extending,” he said. “IBM comes out with a new mainframe every two years, and that new mainframe always has added functionality and added features, so the COBOL compiler has to be updated to take advantage of those innovations, and the existing code needs to be modified accordingly.”
- He added that because of COBOL’s famous fault tolerance, the software probably didn’t show any signs of underlying issues until the onslaught of COVID-related claims led to rapid scaling.
If you can conjugate a verb in Latin, you can probably learn COBOL.
- The University of North Carolina system, for example, offers COBOL training at only one of its 17 campuses, he said. Because 95 percent of all COBOL runs on mainframes (another thing young students know little about), COBOL is best taught side-by-side with mainframe computing.
- “The problem is not a lack of interest among students; it’s a lack of knowledge of the platform,” he said. “Younger people don’t even know what the mainframe is or what it does, so one of my missions is to expose newcomers to mainframe technology and COBOL.”
And, the advice of Cameron Seay, who teaches COBOL at East Carolina University in North Carolina and co-chairs the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Working Group:
- “People need to understand that this stuff is in use,” he said. “COBOL is a very important language. It’s not dead. It’s not dying. It’s going to be with us for a while. It’s a great way to start your career. You certainly need to learn Python and Java and other languages, but it gives you something that other folks don’t have.”
But for me, knowing COBOL is a lesson in logic that offered a career edge when coupled with business knowledge. If you can conjugate a Latin verb, you might still remember the four divisions in the COBOL structure. For the uninitiated, those divisions are identification, environment, data, and procedure.
COBOL aeternum = COBOL lives forever.
Overview by Brian Riley, Director, Credit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group