May 28, 1959: inventing a language for business

Year 1959: The Pentagon meeting gives rise to a computer language, which will later become known as Cobol (COBOL) and will be the primary means of business computing for the next 40 years.

“Kobol”, in abbreviated form from Common Business-Oriented Language, was one of the first computer languages. And, along with FORTRAN, it was one of the first programming languages ​​based on English vocabulary.

Kobol owes its existence to Grace Hopper , one of the first computer programmers. Grace made her first programmer steps in the US Navy reserve, typing machine code for a computer Harvard Mark I during the Second World War. In the late 1950s, she came to the conclusion that computer languages ​​could be made similar to human language, and thus more understandable than the assembler and machine code used then.
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Feeling a good deal for creating a more accessible and useful programming language for business, in 1959 the Pentagon assembled several working committees. Among them were representatives of various computer manufacturers, so that this language would not depend on the iron component. The most productive committee quickly wrote the initial specification of the language, using the Flow-Matic Hopper language as a starting point, diluting it with ideas borrowed from IBM's Comtran business-oriented language.

By December 1959, the committee had finished work on the specification of the language and called it COBOL. The first compilers of Kobol appeared extremely quickly - already in 1960. The language underwent changes and in 1968 passed the specification of the American National Standards Institute. Kobol seemed attractive to business application developers because of its readability, accessibility, and the simplicity with which it could be used to calculate business functions. By 1997, according to the Gartner Group, 80 percent of enterprises use Kobol, and the total length of the source code for all applications on Kobol is 200 billion lines in total.

This legacy turned into a monstrous burden when IT administrators made a belated discovery that the design of the Kobol language was pushing programmers to store data on the year with only two digits. This prompted the fear of potential system failures with the arrival of 2000, because, for example, software would suddenly start reporting the age of someone born in 1959, like -59 years old (00-59 = -59), rather than 41 ( 2000-1959 = 41) year. Suddenly, thousands of retired programmers at Kobol were returned back to work, if only they plowed up the old code and updated the programs, ensuring their efficiency after 2000.

Although most of these programs survived the 2000 problem, Kobol was not doing so well. It should be noted that it continues to be used in many places, especially on older mainframes and minicomputers. An expert programmer at Grady Buch told Wired magazine in 2003 that “even the old system on Kobol could take root on the web, controlling the new site.”

Now "Kobol" is not a field for active research and scientific work. Nobody goes to college, planning to learn the language of "Kobol", and you will most likely be expelled from your IT-department with ridicule if you suggest the next project to be implemented in this programming language. Individuals attempted to modernize and update the Kobol standards in the early 2000s, but this group has not updated its website since 2005.

For all intents and purposes, "Kobol" is less and less suitable. But its existence has stimulated the development of many other high-level programming languages ​​that use quasi-English syntax (from BASIC to PHP) and made it possible to study programming for the wider masses than before. This trend, we hope, will never go out of fashion.

Source: Wired.com