Instead, COBOL remains widely and actively used across the financial system, with no good plan for transitioning to modern codebases, nor for keeping a viable coder workforce active. Sixty years later, you’d expect COBOL to be the stuff of looping narrative videos at computer-history museums (in fact, there’s part of a floor devoted to mainframes at Seattle’s Living Computers museum, where you can see the old giants in action) maybe you’d hear the name COBOL used in an introductory lecture on computer science to explain how far we’ve come, and chuckle. Before the term “information technology” existed to label the field, learning COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was the only sure way to ensure a lifelong career in IT. Developed in 1959 in part from a previous language design created by the legendary Grace Hopper, COBOL was an early example of an attempt at write-once, run-anywhere code at a time when it was more typical to write software using closely linked assembly language on a mainframe, the only kind of computer around. COBOL’s design allowed for describing business processes, like breaking down and accounting for financial transactions, while its syntax relied on verbose procedural programming that contained aspects of English.
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