Commodore Grace "Amazing Grace" Hopper in 1984 at age 77. US admiral & computer scientist (1906 - 1992)
"A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."
"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission"
Grace Murray Hopper
By Dylan Tweney
May 28, 1959: A meeting at the Pentagon lays the foundations for the computer language that will later be known as COBOL, which goes on to become a mainstay of business computing for the next four decades.
COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, was one of the earliest computer languages. It was also, along with Fortran, one of the first programming languages to be based on English words.
It owes its existence to Grace Hopper, one of the earliest computer programmers. Hopper cut her programming teeth in the U.S. Naval Reserve, writing machine code for the Harvard Mark I computer during World War II. In the late 1950s, she came up with the idea that computer languages could be made to resemble human language, making them far more understandable than the assembly language and machine code used for all computer programming up to that point.
Sensing an opportunity to make computer programming more accessible and useful for business, the 1959 Pentagon meeting set up several working committees. They included reps from various computer manufacturers, so the language would be machine-independent. The most productive of those committees quickly developed the initial language specification, using Hopper’s Flow-Matic language as a starting point, and extending it with ideas from IBM’s business-oriented Fortran sibling, Comtran.
By December 1959, the committee had finished its specifications and named the language COBOL. The first COBOL compilers were built shortly thereafter, in 1960. The language evolved somewhat and became an ANSI specification in 1968.
COBOL’s appeal to business programmers was its readability, accessibility and the ease with which it could be used to compute business functions. By 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that 80 percent of the world’s businesses ran on COBOL, with a cumulative total of 200 billion lines of code in existence.
That legacy turned into an enormous burden, as IT administrators made the belated discovery that COBOL’s language constructs had encouraged programmers to store year data with just two digits. That spurred fears of potential system crashes when the year 2000 rolled around, because (for instance) such software would suddenly start reporting (for instance) the age of someone born in 1959 as -59 (00 – 59 = -59), instead of 41 (2000 – 1959 = 41). Suddenly, thousands of COBOL programmers were pulled out of retirement to comb through stacks of old code, updating programs to ensure their continued viability after the year 2000.
While most of those programs survived Y2K, COBOL itself hasn’t fared so well. To be sure, it’s still in use in many places (particularly old mainframe and minicomputer systems). Programming expert Grady Booch told Wired magazine in 2003 that “even an old COBOL system can end up pushed out onto the web, driving a new site.”
But COBOL itself is no longer a field of active research and study. Nobody goes to college planning to study COBOL programming, and you’d probably be laughed out of the IT department if you suggested your company’s next big programming effort should be based on the language. An effort to modernize and update COBOL standards got started in the early 2000s, but that group doesn’t appear to have updated its website since 2005.
For all intents and purposes, COBOL is on the wane. But its existence spurred the development of many other high-level computer languages that use quasi-English syntax, from BASIC to PHP, and helped put computer programming within reach of a far wider group of people than before. That’s a trend that we hope never goes out of style, by the grace of Grace.
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