COBOL – The Misunderstood Language

COBOL has been ridiculed by the younger developers for some time now. I have experienced this over the years when I divulge that I’m a software developer. What you need to understand about COBOL is there are millions of lines of code in the world, running as the back-end of huge corporations. There are also many mid-sized businesses utilizing COBOL. These lines of code will probably never go away even though many predictions said it would die out.

COBOL has now been written to run on Windows servers and PC Computers by a couple of major software developers. The best part of this is that you can add embedded SQL to the code to access the relational database.

The best of both worlds now

If you really want to have a long-term career, you should take a serious look at COBOL. There are many resources on the internet, including a large website about COBOL training on the IBM website.

When you look up COBOL programming on the job websites such as Indeed and Monster you will see that besides COBOL, many companies want experience or exposure to the newer languages such as C#, .NET, SQL Server, Oracle, UNIX, etc. This gives you the best of both worlds to be a much sought-after developer. Become a real power developer.

Boring?

I heard younger developers say that with COBOL, it is a boring job as you only do maintenance. While that is true to a point, there is much new coding to be done as technology and business practices change in the future. The front end of applications change and there is a need to be able to exchange data back and forth, and new coding must be created. With business practices also changing over time, there will be new COBOL programs written.

Not a simple language

When taking a high-level look at COBOL code, it seems like it is a simple language. But it was made to READ easier than other languages. The commands themselves are very powerful, and you need to have a more in-depth knowledge of the hardware/software relationship than in the new languages. Many other languages such as C++ or C# are very hard to read when needing a modification. Many times the code segment is rewritten rather than modified.

Newer languages are mostly “calls” to DLL, or libraries, or other snippets that may be written by other developers, and you are just putting the code pieces together. COBOL doesn’t have extensive libraries, so you must code pretty much everything yourself. That to me was a great challenge, even when you need to do maintenance on a program.

You can get down to the “bit level” when coding programs. The challenge is to make the program run as fast and efficiently as you can. You can’t match the throughput of a mini-computer or a mainframe computer when processing transactions.

The need for developers

There is a big need for COBOL developers and the need gets larger every day due to developers retiring. The developers that are currently working are now approaching the age of retirement. This is another area of humor that all the developers are mostly seniors. But look at all the new college graduates or self-taught coders that are all in competition for jobs today.

Because of the pandemic, many employees had to work from home. After a taste of working from home, they are resisting going back to the office. When you check the job sites like Indeed or Monster, you will see that many jobs can be remote. This is due to the need for COBOL programmers and not a result of the pandemic.

Don’t ignore COBOL because of false statements

I’ve seen it time and time again that many developers learn a language such as C# or PYTHON and they believe all software should be developed using that language. This is the worst thinking that you can have. A true developer will use the right language for the right purpose for ease of use for user interfaces and creating efficient code.

I hope this will persuade a couple of the younger developers to give COBOL a chance. I left the industry as I was tired after 30-plus years. If I was younger, I would still be banging out the COBOL code.

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This story first appeared in another platform here.