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COBOL for Not Yet Techies"Computer Careers: The Computer Language that Refuses to Die – You Could Still Need it on a High Tech Job even if It’s Your 2nd or 3rd Language – Even after Y2K"by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career |
COBOL is one of the two earliest "high-level" computer careers languages.The other high level language besides COBOL was FORTRAN. COBOL is the one used by business. "High-level" means that it is a step up from computer assembler language. Be thankful that programmers no longer directly instruct computers with long series of 0s and 1s. Because no matter how much faster and bigger our computers are, they are still simply manipulating long series of 0s and 1s. COBOL was an important advance on that. It was essential that computer programming become faster and more efficient. Businesses simply could not wait forever while their computer jobs programmers fed in those 0s and 1s. Therefore, some smart people came up with high level languages, and that’s what we think of today as computer languages. COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language, and as you might guess, it was geared toward the needs of business. The author of COBOL is Grace Hopper, a U.S. Navy admiral who also gets credit for discovering the first computer "bug." You wouldn’t think the Navy would pioneer business applications, but in this case the government was ahead of private industry. After all, they have to meet a payroll and pay their bills too. COBOL was designed to be self-documenting, and also to handle large amounts of repetitive records, such as inventory, customer and employee data. The "self-documenting" goal was not really attained, but the authors did make it notoriously wordy. That is just like the government, right? COBOL uses a lot more words than other programs because it claims it wants you to understand what it’s doing, but unless you know the language, you can’t understand what it’s doing. COBOL is still in wide use on business mainframe computers, although newer computer career languages are gradually replacing it in some companies.For many years, however, knowing it was not a skill in great demand in new employees. That changed a few years ago, however. Guess why? Yes, the Year 2 Thousand. Yep, these programmers in the 60s and 70s were the guilty culprits who set us up for Y2K problems. They’re the "idiots" who never dreamed their programs would still be in use 30-40 years later, so they cut corners (saved then-highly valuable computer space) by leaving out the first 2 digits of the year. These COBOL programs are what businesses frantically reviewed, re-wrote and tested through the end of last year.I’ve been told by a programmer that this means it is going to be used for many more years. Because so many businesses have invested so much money in repairing their Y2K problems, they are going to keep those programs come Hell or high water, until the Year 10,000 rolls around. So, paradoxically, Y2K has given it a long new lease on life. The same is not true for the programmers. COBOL programmers were in great demand in the late 90s, but that could not continueA lot of people from Silicon Valley to India learned COBOL to earn money fixing Y2K problems. That means that after all that code was re-written, there was a lot of these programmers looking for work. A lot of these programmers are used to living on much lower incomes than the average American.If you are a prospective programmer now, that means that while it’s good to know COBOL if you plan to have a computer career with a mainstream American company, you should not make it your first or major language. Just a backup, supplemental skill. Next: Pascal |
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Permission is granted to reprint the above article in an ezine or on a website as long as it is reprinted in full, with no changes, with full credit and with this contact information and link included at the bottom. All other rights reserved. Copyright 2007 by Info Ring Press All Rights Reserved. Computer Careers (Home) Sitemap Contact Privacy Info Ring Press Richard Stooker PO Box 617 130-G Ballwin Manor Dr Ballwin, MO 63011 (636) 394-2052 rick@inforingpress.com |