What is COBOL used for?
Answer
COmmon Business Oriented Language 'invented' by Grace Murray Hopper ( read about her she is one one of the pivotal people in the development of computing as we know it today). The general idea was to produce a language that was English based as opposed to mathematically based or expressed as such in the code.
Very simply put you would use a construct like
ADD YEARS TO AGE
as opposed to
age = age + years
or
age += years
Appearing in the early 1960's it was massively adopted for processing in the area of business. There are still a large volume of applications built in COBOL still running and maintained and it is still very much alive and kicking. Around 1997 Gartner reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually. So you could do a lot worse than learn COBOL to ensure you have a job for life.
The structure of a cobol program is summarised in the Mnemonic In Every Damn Program. Meaning that there is an:-
- Identification Division giving information about the program
- Environment Division describing the hardware
- Data Division (In my day we used CODASYL now better known and newly re-invented as no-sql
- Procedure Division 'Here be code'
Because of the legacy from punch cards (yes i used them as well) you always started the code by indenting 8 spaces in else some compilers would not recognise it (shades of Python where whitespace is significant).
It is of course a compiled language.
Where is it used. Governments, the Military Businesses of all sizes but usually the larger corporates so i suppose you could say everywhere and it is used to run governments, and the Military and business's. I believe the US's social welfare system runs on several million lines of Cobol written in the mid 60's. Experian a large UK based credit rating company uses it throughout there operation with interfaces to the web. Again in the UK most of the Building Societies and Banks run their core systems on it.
I could go on but i won't go and read about it. And by the way you can even get Object Oriented Cobol if you want