During a 3-hours fancy course yesterday, Ms. De Donder told us again about the so called revival of the ancient language Cobol. In business the youngest programmers who still know about the structure of Cobol are about to retire. Still, the language is deeply burned into the most important and highly sensitive infrastructures of the world, such as bank software and the internet. The problem is of course that companies are terrified to switch over to fast modern languages such as C++. One mistake or shutdown could lead to millions of unsatisfied customers. Meanwhile, Cobol-programs do still work at very high performances, so why all the fuss ?

Because it will actually die some day. Not because of the legacy paradigm or the expensive maintenance. But simply because almost every student in my class hates it ! IBM already saw this evolution long time before, so they introduced the specialization mainframes in our education. Unfortunately, only about 5 students choose for this option. (not including me, because i don’t like computer architecture)

In my specialization ‘programming’, we fortunately continue to get 10 to 15 hours of Cobol. Considering that last year I became the best student in Cobol with 17 / 20, I expect that finding a job with big cash won’t be that hard. At least if designing maintaining back-end software would be at my interest…

I think I have a luxury problem.