It's only a matter of time until the Common Business Oriented Language
(COBOL) will regain its spotlight as one of the most in-demand skills of
future generations of software engineers. We can just see it now:
Programmers of the future will hop out of their driverless cars, walk
into their offices and sit down to start coding in 1959's COBOL.
It sounds crazy, considering COBOL is the furthest thing from most all
engineers' minds today. It ranks fairly low in the Tiobe Index, a
measurement of today's most popular programming languages. Many newer,
speedier languages give today's coders little reason not to scoff at the
antiquated COBOL. The most telling evidence of COBOL's irrelevancy is
that about 70% of universities said they don't even include COBOL in
their computer science curriculum anymore, according to a recent survey.
It's logical. Why waste curriculum space for a skill that employers
don't even look for these days? A quick search for "COBOL programmer" on
any job site, for instance, yields a few hundred job postings while the
more popular "Java programmer" yields thousands.
Based on these facts alone, COBOL appears to be nearly extinct. You
might even wonder why we're writing about COBOL at all? But looks can be
deceiving. COBOL is a mysterious paradox. Born in another era, COBOL
lives on as the quiet but important pillar on which the majority of
businesses stand today. In a field that evolves at an unprecedented
speed, younger generations may be overlooking a critical skill of the
future.
http://blog.hackerrank.com/the-inevitable-return-of-cobol/
--
Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. g...@gabegold.com
3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 (703) 204-0433
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabegold Twitter: GabeG0
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