Are you currently maintaining a COBOL application? I’m certainly not; in fact, I’d probably struggle to count, on one hand, the number of people I know who could recognize COBOL. Yet, COBOL applications are still running today. Moreover, in an article entitled “COBOL: The New Latin ” the author states:
“the use of COBOL is growing…by about a billion lines per year.”
Yes, that does read a billion, but why should you care? The author believes you should care because COBOL skills could yield some large amounts of cash for skilled COBOL programmers; however, I look at this scenario a bit differently.
If COBOL is still out there running; in fact, running business critical applications judging by its formidable growth, what does that mean for the code you’re writing today? If history is any indication, the code you write today will most likely be around a long, long time, especially if it has any business value to it.
That means the practices and decisions you put into place today will affect someone, most likely not yourself in the future– in some cases the far out future. This also implies that the decisions of the past are affecting you now.
Clearly, software applications that achieve business value are far from ephemeral flashes in a pan– so what are you doing today to ensure these systems can still run tomorrow? Not only does software live a lot longer than intended, it’s also entropic– without an insightful software process that encourages quality, software systems will become more complex and harder to change.
Latin is often labeled a dead language, yet, I had to take a year of it in high school– and I didn’t attend high school 2,000 years ago. Spoken languages never really die, they survive in texts and are carried forth by academics. Programming languages rarely die either. They linger as applications that go on and on until the cost to maintain them overtakes the cost to rewrite them. And, it seems clear, as demonstrated by the growth of COBOL code, that this means applications can last “in aeternum”, which in Latin means “for eternity.”
April 30th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
[…] Instead, it appears that the vast majority of us don’t want to admit that software is aeternum and thus go about learning how to build interesting applications with equally interesting new frameworks and technologies. I’ll be doing the same, but with the added realization that many of those interesting applications will indeed be built and will undoubtedly be spending the majority of development costs in maintenance. […]