Ah, the joys of COBOL.

COBOL is not without its uses and I confess I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of the stuff myself—though not any in the last 25 years. But when I began developing programs professionally, the program was still considered to be the flowchart. Debugging was done at one's desk and only when throughly debugged was the machine code to implement it entered—one instruction at a time—into the computer. There was no compiler, assembler nor operating system and flowchart symbols represented exactly one machine instruction.

My first high-order language was FORTRAN followed by assembler and LISP. I had several years of professional experience before taking a position requiring COBOL. It's difficult to express and painful to recall what an unpleasant experience that was. It was easy to learn and master but so mind-numbingly verbose as to give one writing cramps trying to express any meaningful algorithm. By comparrison, PL/I was a breath of fresh air.

I remember leading a development project once in which the nightly processing exceeded its alloted schedule by more than three hours. Careful profiling revealed the time was being spent in a numeric conversion routine developed at another location. It was a 600 line COBOL program converting decimal strings to base 32. I replaced it with a 50 line assembler routine and thereafter the whole system ran in 45 minutes.

COBOL may be many things but one thing it is surely not is elegant; at least not in any mathematical sense. Grace Hopper notwithstanding, I don't think there are any influential computer scientists with a high opinion of COBOL. Familiar quotes include:

• The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. — Edsger Dijkstra
  
• I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used perform instead of do. — Larry Wall
  
• Cobol has almost no fervent enthusiasts. As a programming tool, it has roughly the sex appeal of a wrench. — Charles Petzold
  
• A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard. — John Krueger
  
• The tree large enough that a stake capable of killing COBOL could be fashioned from its trunk has not yet grown anywhere upon the face of this verdant planet. — Dan Martinez
  
• The Windows API has done more to retard skill development than anything since COBOL maintenance. — Larry O'Brien
  
• COBOL programmers are destined to code COBOL for the rest of their lives, and thereafter. — Bertrand Meyer

These and many other condesending quotations about COBOL, plus every other computer programming language, may be enjoyed in detail at sysprog.net. Enjoy.

Another of my favorite quotations is “I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.” — Stephen Hawking

      - Mark