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.
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.