Yet, Dr. Dobb's makes a good case for why it might be, maybe even should be.
Traditional COBOL is indeed a terrible, terrible language. It's unstructured, and extremely verbose, making it complicated to get anything done right. While it has gotten better, truthfully, it really should be replaced by another language.
A lot of the code that is written in COBOL is for business applications, and that's fine. However, you will be hard-pressed to convince me that today it's not a lot cheaper for the average user of such a system to find an off the shelf product, than to maintain custom code written for the company many years ago. A lot of these business apps are commodities today, and it's time that businesses started treating them like that.
Traditional COBOL is indeed a terrible, terrible language. It's unstructured, and extremely verbose, making it complicated to get anything done right. While it has gotten better, truthfully, it really should be replaced by another language.
A lot of the code that is written in COBOL is for business applications, and that's fine. However, you will be hard-pressed to convince me that today it's not a lot cheaper for the average user of such a system to find an off the shelf product, than to maintain custom code written for the company many years ago. A lot of these business apps are commodities today, and it's time that businesses started treating them like that.
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COBOL?! God help us!
Maybe that is what will cause the end of the world...
:D
Either you are proficient in COBOL or you aren't, and if you aren't I'm sure it a frustrating language to be around. Similarly, if you are from another country I'm sure that to you English is a horrible language. But bad-mouthing English and saying it's a terrible old thing is, let's face it, just sour grapes. A good COBOL programmer can do complex things very quickly. It is not hard to maintain COBOL code if you are a good COBOL programmer. The complexity frustrating you is not in the COBOL language, which is actually very straight-forward, but in the business application that the COBOL code is written to support. COBOL is a good language for dealing with complex business processing because it is so straight-forward. But if you are going to automate a complex business process then the coding must be complex. It easy to write a simple program in any language, but nobody seems to want simple things automated.
The problem that I had with COBOL in college was that it lacked block structure, which everything from Algol 60 and onward seems to have, but traditional COBOL. I started out doing some basic C programming, and do Java and Perl on a regular basis now, so you can imagine that it's a mindf#$% for me to have work without reusable code blocks.