I Took a COBOL Course and I Liked It

COBOL is in the news again. Millions of people are filing unemployment claims nearly all at once, and the systems to process them are failing. Why? They need to scale to unprecedented levels, they’re written in COBOL, and… we don’t have enough COBOL programmers.

Here’s a look at the increase in searches for “COBOL programmers”:

Most COBOL programmers are retired. The pipeline of new COBOL programmers is nearly nonexistent. Many are coming out of retirement just to help.

This piqued my curiosity. I know nothing about COBOL, other than it’s old, still used a lot, and it was created by one of my heroes, Admiral Grace Hopper. I looked to see if Pluralsight had a course about it, and they do. It’s called Getting Started with Mainframe COBOL. It’s 100% free in April, and I recommend you check it out.

Why Did I Take a COBOL Course?

So after reading about this problem I started thinking about COBOL again and got curious. Do I want to get a job as a COBOL programmer? Am I going to use this? No. As much as I love to roll up my sleeves and help in a crisis, I love my job and where I’m at. I don’t want to be a COBOL programmer. I’m just curious. I had to know how this decades-old language really works.

So I took this course and found out. Here’s what I learned.

How COBOL Programs Work

As I started to dig in, I immediately started hearing terms and acronyms I am not familiar with. This must be how a non-technical person feels when they’re trying to understand new technology. It’s an eye-opener. There’s a big COBOL world that exists, and I am unaware of it. I forged on.

COBOL programs are text (ok, that I can relate to) and they are divided into four main divisions:

• Identification Division
• Environment Division
• Data Division
• Procedure Division

As a seasoned developer, I can probably assume what most of these things are, but I kept going to see…