How do you feel about COBOL?

[Rayru18]

Most of the times I hear people say it's a dead language, I decided to take an elective class in my college on COBOL, many people said it was just a waste of time, money and space for a better class; I honestly think it wasn't.

 

In my opinion, maybe COBOL is just not high and living as it once did a long time ago, but I've seen more and more recruiters look for people with experience in the language, this is due to the fact that the people on the teams they've had working on COBOL are either moving to some other project or retiring, and with many people just saying that it's a "dead language" and a "waste of time" it's being harder for them to actually find people with at least basic knowledge on the language. I understand the fact that they could just migrate the information and things they have on that language to a newer one, but some companies can't deal with the risks of migrating years of data and having something happen to it.

 

I have a friend who just started working a few months ago and to our surprise it was with COBOL, turns out he got the position thanks to taking the class as an elective; I've also talked with a few recruiters and they are amazed and glad to see that there is still people, who are about to finish college, that have some knowledge in COBOL. Things like this are just a few that make me feel towards saying that it wasn't a waste of time, even if all those periods do make us go crazy at times.

 

I honestly would like to hear other people's feelings towards this matter, so do you think it's worth learning at least the basics of this language, or do you think it's just a waste of time?

 

Thanks in advance!

[bryce12]

COBOL is not dead. I worked for a big software company and there were plenty of people working in COBOL projects. However the number of new development projects were almost zero as most of them were maintenance projects catering to Fortune 500 companies. As long as IBM Mainframes are being used by corporations, there is slim chance that COBOL is going to die.

[__Darknite]

Its horrible language no offence to anyone.

 

It was a language experiment that went horribly wrong

[Rayru18]

Darknite, I do have to agree it's definitely not the best language out there and could be the main cause for migraines to a ton of people, lol, but yeah still something to be working with.

I see what you mean Bryce, thinking about it, maybe I shouldn't have been so surprise with people looking for programmers in it, like I said on my previews post. Probably the programmers that were working with it for the past, maybe, 10 years, got tired of it and asked to change projects or just retired, creating the need to look for new people.

[JHTech100]

I've hardly heard of COBOL and definitely haven't used it, however, I don't believe a programming language truly dies until it is no longer developed for used. As long as there's a medium-sized project on it, the language is still alive, in my opinion.

 

It's like if everyone leaves PHP, but Facebook uses it. I wouldn't say then that PHP would be dead.

[Kakashi2020]

COBOL or Common Business Oriented Language was a batch processing language back then, it was used widely in business processing on mainframe computing.  Do you know that ATM transactions use COBOL?   It was the third language I learned next to FORTRAN.