"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
- Edsger W. Dijkstra
A little
geneology/historical background for COBOL:
1943 --
ENIAC First general purpose electronic
computer
1948 --
UNIVAC First commercial
computer
1952 --
A-O First
compiler (of sorts)
1954 --
FLOWMATIC First English-like programming language
1957 --
FORTRAN, a language based on
algebraic formulas
1958 --
COMMERCIAL TRANSLATOR is
IBM competitor to
FLOWMATIC
1959 -- First COBOL specifications introduced by
CODASYL
1960 -- First COBOL implementation
1968 --
ANSI develops ANS COBOL Standard
According to LegacyJ Corp., one of several companies trying to revive COBOL by transforming it into a web scripting language (
*shudder*) and trying to support
Web based interfaces to legacy COBOL code:
"There are over 180 billion lines of COBOL in use today, with an estimated 5 million new lines added each year. There are as many as 2.5 million programmers who have primary skills in COBOL, far exceeding any other programming language. Investments in COBOL technologies, staff, hardware is estimated to be over 5 trillion dollars."