I have seen the future, and its name is COBOL
Nothing puts day-to-day developments in the Ajax world into perspective quite like a sit-down with someone from an earlier generation of software developers. I got the chance for just such a conversation recently when my dad came down to Chicago for a White Sox game. My father worked in Battle Creek, MI, for Post/General Foods/Kraft/Philip Morris/Altria for close to 35 years, first as a computer operator and later as a programmer. For most of that time, he wrote in COBOL, followed by a few years of C development in the '80s and early '90s, then retirement. Chatting with my dad about the ups and downs of his department and his career, I couldn't help but think about how little things have changed. Now, as then, a successful career in technology is as much about maintaining expertise in foundational technologies as jumping on the latest bandwagon.
COBOL doesn't come up, well, ever on blogs like this one, but it's still one of the most-used programming languages on the planet. As this article on the future of COBOL attests, COBOL still provides the business logic and transaction processing for most financial institutions and other big companies. Sure, Java and .Net provide a bridge between COBOL back-ends and shiny new web interfaces. But the fact is, millions of new lines of COBOL are still written every year. ANSI's latest standardization of the language, COBOL 2002, is only five years old.
A friend of mine who works as a government bank examiner joined my father and me for lunch. He told us how difficult it is for regulatory agencies to find people who are qualified to look at the guts of COBOL systems to assess their compliance with laws and regulations. COBOL still gets taught in the computer-science curriculum, but most practicing COBOL developers get snapped up by the organizations that need them most: banks, manufacturing companies and other large businesses. A lot of large banks are even looking to partner with computer-science departments to produce a new generation of COBOL developers. According to my friend - and all of the causal reading I've done - mainframe-based COBOL code can still process millions of transactions a day in a fraction of the time it would take to do it in Java. Think about that the next time your online banking system is on hold because their "system is being updated."
None of this really has much to do with the development of rich internet applications, but it's interesting to think that someday the technologies we're all iterating over so rapidly will seem, to the next generation of technologists, like total anachronisms. Let's hope that, like today's COBOL developers, our skills will still be in high demand even when the technologies we're using become old hat. I know I'll think twice next time I start griping about legacy systems.
