A Salute to COBOL

Federal Computer Week has an article on the persistence of COBOL. Seems FSA isn't the only agency stuck in that world. (I met my wife when we both took a COBOL class way back when, so I have fond memories of the language. )

"because Cobol uses programming terminology that is close to the way people use regular English, it’s still considered the best language for capturing an organization’s business rules. Other languages use fairly arcane terminology that make it hard to capture those processes..."

"The Social Security Administration is wrapping essential Cobol applications in Extensible Markup Language envelopes and publishing them as service-oriented architecture services. It will retain about 20 percent of the 36 million lines of Cobol code it uses...."

Problem is, when you accept COBOL and the business rules it embodies, you accept the past. As a liberal, I have to think the future will require different business rules. And if neither the programmer nor the business type understand the rules in the IT system, you're, as we used to say, "cruising for a bruisin' ".