Grace Hopper was a phenomenon. She earned a doctorate in mathematics from Yale, was a professor at Vassar, and left the U.S. Navy with the rank of rear admiral. Her contributions to the field of computing can be judged by the number of foundations and programs that have been created in her memory. //

Driven to create a programming language closer to English than the machine-code computers understand, Hopper developed the first compiler. This opened the door for the first compiled languages, such as FLOW-MATIC. This earned her a seat on the Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) of 1959.

She was also instrumental in the specification and development of the Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL). The first meeting took place on June 23, 1959, and its report and specification of the COBOL language followed in April 1960.

COBOL contained some groundbreaking concepts. Arguably, the most significant of these was the ability to run on hardware produced by different manufacturers, which was unprecedented at the time.

The language was elaborate and provided a near-English vocabulary for programmers to work with. It was designed to handle huge volumes of data and to be exceptionally mathematically accurate.

Its vocabulary of reserved words (the words that make up the language) runs close to 400. A programmer strings these reserved words together so they make syntactical sense and create a program.

Any programmer who’s familiar with other languages will tell you 400 is an incredible number of reserved words. For comparison, the C language has 32, and Python has 33. //

As clunky as it might seem today, COBOL was revolutionary when it launched. It found favor within the financial sector, federal government, and major corporations and organizations. This was due to its scalability, batch handling capabilities, and mathematical precision. It was installed in mainframes all over the world, took root, and flourished. Like a stubborn weed, it just won’t die.

Our dependency on systems that still run on COBOL is astonishing. A report from Reuters in 2017 shared the following jaw-dropping statistics:

• There are 220 billion lines of COBOL code still in use today.
• COBOL is the foundation of 43 percent of all banking systems.
• Systems powered by COBOL handle $3 trillion of daily commerce.
• COBOL handles 95 percent of all ATM card-swipes.
• COBOL makes 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions possible. //

The programmers who know COBOL are either retired, thinking about retiring, or dead. We’re steadily losing the people who have the skills to keep these vital systems up and running. New, younger programmers don’t know COBOL. Most also don’t want to work on systems for which you have to maintain ancient code or write new code.

This is such a problem that Bill Hinshaw, a COBOL veteran, was coerced out of retirement to found COBOL Cowboys. This private consulting firm caters to desperate corporate clients that can’t find COBOL-savvy coders anywhere. The “youngsters” at COBOL Cowboys (the motto of which is “Not Our First Rodeo”) are in their 50s. They believe 90 percent of Fortune 500 business systems run on COBOL. //

This is a widespread and deeply embedded problem. A 2016 report from the Government Accountability Office listed COBOL systems running on mainframes up to 53-years-old. These include systems used to process data related to the Department of Veterans Affairs, The Department of Justice, and the Social Security Administration. //

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