Cobol provides job security

It says alot about the entire basis of the recent be-a-teacher ad campaign, they took the old joke "if you can't do, teach" and in classic unimaginative dullard form changed it to "if you CAN, teach" haha! Brilliant! Not. And that's about the best you can hope for from a teacher. Despite their recent pay phillip and the glamourisation by the teachers tv series they'll always be kn0b3nds that don't have a clue about what they're teaching. You only get real knowledge from the industry and in most cases this means when you're young from your parents. So kids, be good to the teachers you like and make sure they get the marks at the end of the year that'll get them a pat on the back from the Head, but bear in mind everything they say is rubbish and completely useless in the real world.

Actually, dr. Binns should have taught you ASSEMBLER (the S/3x0 variety, to be exact)... you'd be much better off than with CoBOL, for only a few guys manage it today (SRP - ZAP - BAL anyone?).

And don't say we're STUCK on mainframes.... unixes and windozes are nice... for young boys. Z/os is entirely a different beast (luckily...). No way you can crash another task by messing around the memory, no security holes (provided you use a DECENT password policy) and tasks are scheduled correctly across the CPUS (mainframes were multi-core AGES ago....).... BTW mainframes do have C/C++, Java, Fortran.... no Visual Basic and Pascal, though.

The only drawback is the cost of mainframes.... but usually you don't have to own one, you just have to work for some big company that owns it! And the total lack of GUI, of course... but that is NOT a drawback!

So, Nick, are you ready to

PERFORM cobol-classes UNTIL you-get-it? :-)

Regards from an old mainframe fart (who may as well lose his job despite knowing CoBOL and ASM in a latin country....)

can do a lot more useful work than a yoof with a jcb!

The only reason COBOL still exists is because there are COBOL programmers looking for jobs. Don't learn COBOL. It's the worlds most bass-ackwards language. Real programmers don't program is pseudo-english, and banks need real programmers (it would help greatly in reducing the number of stolen credit card numbers)

I don't know who Dan is or what his agenda might be, but his comments make no sense at all. "The only reason COBOL still exists is because there are COBOL programmers looking for jobs". Whaaa-aaaat??? That's the most bass-ackwards argument I've seen this decade. Do you think that if I start looking for a job as Wizard of Oz that will magically conjure the Emerald Kingdom into existence?

As for "real programmers don't program is pseudo-english", that's ridiculous too. Are you suggesting that good source code must be completely cryptic, to the point of having no perceptible resemblance to English?

Obviously, the reason COBOL is still in demand is that a huge proportion of the computer systems that actually run the daily world around us depend on it. And that obviously means that it does work. 

What I can't understand is why software developers and IT directors alike persist in chasing after the very latest "new new" thing, instead of sticking to what's tried and tested. It's almost as if they were more interested in having fun, one-upping their mates, or padding out their CVs than in doing a good job. (As if that were possible).

Richard Stallman recently commented that software development is the only industry he knows of that is more fashion-conscious than women's fashion. He really nailed that one.

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense" -Edsger Dijkstra

Has anyone stopped to think that maybe the suicide rate for Cobol programmers could be causing the demand?

From the examples in wikipedia, it makes me wish I hard learned cobol instead of C, Assembly (Motorola 6HC08 series microprocessor and Matlab script).

I think i would be able to understand cobol easier due to its natural english syntax.

@Tom: that is so true!

I am amazed that people would find this article informative. The sky is blue, water is wet, and COBOL is THE MOST USED computer language in the world. It is the best choice for business applications, period. 
Nevertheless, thanks for bringing up the subject again.

Have you considered that your teacher was perhaps restricted by budgets or curriculum? Only recently have teachers been given more flexibility in respect of what they teach.

Anyway, you learned programming concepts so it shouldn't be too hard to move over to a new language.

$ SET SOURCEFORMAT"FREE"
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. ShortestProgram.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DisplayPrompt.
DISPLAY "Dan the poster is an idiot".
STOP RUN.

together was the term my COBOL instructor used to define it.

Must admit I found FORTRAN hard.

As my ENGLISH developed I left the world of computing and entered the world of the living instead.

I still don't know if that was a good move though.

Maybe we should have stayed in the trees ... or not crawled out of the ocean either??

I am glad it stills survives ... other people should go through he torture we edured all of those years ago ...

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense" -Edsger Dijkstra 

I never heard this before, but in 40 years of providing technical support to mostly COBOL programmers, I've discovered that the only people who think COBOL is a good language are those who don't know any other. In fact, I've worked in companies that have tried to switch from COBOL to the infinitely superior PL/1, only to revert, because the COBOL dimwits kept on thinking in COBOL while trying to program in PL/1, thus failing to take advantage of PL/1's benefits. For better or worse, I guess, IBM, seeing that they were fighting a futile war in their attempts to promote PL/1, has been implementing many of the latter's feature's into COBOL. That may make it more usable, but it will always be ugly.