Related: Coronavirus COVID-19: 15 Sites You Can Trust for Reliable InformationĬOBOL systems cannot be changed quickly enough to respond to crisis situations. However, it would have taken five months to adjust the program to implement the calculation. For example, Congress had planned to respond to the surge in unemployment by calculating unemployment pay-outs based on lost wages. The US unemployment system runs on COBOL and it is very difficult and expensive to make changes to the program. In 2020, COVID-19 created a new programming problem. It is possible to change legacy systems, but it can take time and can be costly. It took US governments and businesses several years and $100 billion dollars to deal with the Y2k bug. It was feared that when the year changed to 2000, the year 00 would not be recognized as valid, cause issues with the date sequences, and potentially crash many systems.
Many year dates were saved in computers using the last two digits of the year instead of the full year. This makes it challenging for programmers to understand legacy code.įor example, in the 90s we faced the Y2K bug. As the language evolved, many different dialects were created-300 of them!
However, one of the biggest issues with COBOL is that despite being designed to be a common language, it isn’t. Academics are often interested in different questions, and thus, promote different programming languages. It was designed to solve business problems and is optimized for issues such as data processing. COBOL was created by the business community, not the academic one.
Related: How to Keep Your Code Clean With Object EncapsulationĪnother reason that COBOL is not popular is that it is rarely taught at universities. Poor usage of the GOTO command can make COBOL code convoluted. The GOTO command allowed the programmer to tell the program to jump to a different line. The primary culprit of poorly structured code was the GOTO command.Īs mentioned earlier, COBOL is procedural, so the computer reads each line of code, top to bottom in order. Spaghetti code is a derogatory term for code that is poorly structured. Few programmers create new programs in COBOL its primary usage is to maintain legacy programs.Ī criticism of COBOL is that programmers had a tendency to write spaghetti code. There are more programming languages today that centered on English commands that have a lot more features than COBOL. So widely adopted, that it is even still used in many places today.ĭespite the past popularity of COBOL, few people know the language. Related: 5 C Programming Tips You Must Learn to Get StartedĬOBOL became widely adopted, particularly by businesses, governments, and financial institutions. However, the most well-known feature of COBOL is that can handle massive amounts of data processing. COBOL is also a self-documenting language, which adds to its usability. This simply means that COBOL programs are designed to follow sequential steps. Much like C, COBOL is a procedural programming language. The same code in COBOL would be written as: For example, in C you might write the following to add two numbers: However, some have criticized it for being too wordy.
Similarly, COBOL uses English terms and was designed to be easy to read. I then was charged with the job of making it easy for businessmen to use our computers.” (The Early Development of Programming Languages pg. At that time I found there were a certain number of students who could not learn mathematics.
It was the first programming language to use English terms for data processing instead of mathematical notation. Image Credit: miss karen / CreativeCommonsĬOBOL was based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC, which was created by Grace Hopper.