COBOL? What’s this COBOL?

COBOL stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language. One of the first of the high-level languages, it was put together by a group sponsored by the Department of Defense to develop a common business language. That group came to be called CODASYL—the Committee on Data Systems Languages—and defined a “common business oriented language,” drawing from Grace Hopper’s FLOW-MATIC, and other languages including Univac’s AIMACO and IBM’s COMTRAN. The resulting language went through more revisions, but rapidly became the dominant language for building business systems, and it has remained dominant since.

Plenty of companies still use COBOL, including IBM, UPS, and Cigna. Mario Ceballos, a software engineer at Cigna, told me, “The syntax is kept simple to allow non-programmers (“The Business”) to read it and understand it. COBOL is meant to be explicit, because there shouldn’t be room for assumptions.”

Of course, it has had its critics. In 1975, Edsgar Dijkstra famously proclaimed that “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence[sic].” This undoubtedly led to the decline of teaching COBOL in universities, but it remained the dominant business language.

But finding people with COBOL skills can be tough. “The mainframe is a very difficult platform to learn, and that’s due to the cost,” said Ceballos. “Individuals do not have the money to pay to lease a mainframe. A very small amount of schools teach courses on mainframes and COBOL. When IBM started remote work and outsourcing, they stopped incentivizing American schools to teach courses in Mainframes and COBOL. The talent pool shifted from on-shore to off-shore. Any local talent will be expensive with their consulting fees.”