Why is COBOL called a professional language and not a taught language?

Answer 1

That's a very interesting question. The short answer is that it is a taught language, however few new programmer's are interested in learning a language that they feel is "obsolete". As we'll see, it is anything but obsolete. But let's start at the beginning:

Prior to 1959, the high-level programming languages of the day were predominantly suited to scientific or Artificial Intelligence applications; there were no languages ideally suited to the business world. In order for businesses to take advantage of computers (mainframes in particular), they not only required the financial clout to afford the machines, they also had to pay handsomely for the specialist engineers and developers who would be required to maintain the systems and develop bespoke programming languages in-house. Those businesses which couldn't afford to hold onto their engineers were quickly swallowed up by competitors that could. For many, the cost of computing was simply prohibitive.

For the smaller businesses to survive and thrive in the computer-age, a common business-oriented programming language was required; one that all businesses could easily adopt and where businesses would be much less reliant upon their in-house development teams. A language where the programming skills would be highly-transferable and, of course, affordable.

COBOL (an acronym of Common Business Oriented Language) was conceived specifically for this purpose. From 1959 onwards, virtually every line of business code was written in COBOL and affordable business software could simply be bought "off the shelf". By 1960, the Department of Defence decreed that all businesses must run on COBOL. COBOL became standardised in 1968 and has continued to evolve ever since.

However, while COBOL was an undoubted success within the business world, other languages quickly surpassed its popularity, including the general-purpose languages C (1972) and C++ (1983), and application languages such as Java (1995). Universities recognised the increased demand for these newer languages thus COBOL all but disappeared from many curriculums.

Nevertheless, COBOL is still the only language that properly deals with the business world, with the key emphasis being:

• heterogeneous "record-structure" data
• decimal arithmetic
• convenient report generation
• mass data access and manipulation
• database support
• GUI development

Many high-level languages are good at some of these key areas, but poor in others. COBOL is the only language that is adequate or good across all these key areas.

However, when you consider that there are literally billion of lines of COBOL code still in use today, it does beg the question why COBOL is seldom taught at University today. After all, the average age of the COBOL programmer is around 55 so young COBOL programmers are in high-demand. Within the next 10 years or so, more than half of the current programmers will have retired. Someone has to maintain that code and continue its development far beyond the next decade. And if those who know the code inside out are no longer here, who's going to teach the next generation of programmers?

Much of the code in use today is central to some extremely sensitive information (credit card information, banking information, health records, social security data, and so on). Transferring all that information to other languages that weren't designed to handle it is simply not an option.

New programmers simply don't appreciate the importance of "old-fashioned" COBOL, However, many organisations, including IBM, have recognised the impending skills-shortage and have begun to take steps to promote COBOL. While you won't find many COBOL courses at university-level, thanks to the initiative of the businesses themselves, universities bury their COBOL courses in the "Business Systems Programming" courses. And that's where the next generation of graduate business programmers will largely be recruited from.