Where do COBOL programmers come from?

In the late Twentieth Century, COBOL was the standard language for business applications. There were a few other contenders (IBM's RPG, assembly language, and DEC's DIBOL) but COBOL was the undisputed king of the business world. If you were running a business, you used COBOL.

If you worked in the data processing shop of a business, you knew COBOL and programmed with it.

If you were in school, you had a pretty good chance of being taught COBOL. Not everywhere, and not during the entire second half of the century. I attended an engineering school; we learned FORTRAN, Pascal, and assembly language. (We also used the packages SPSS and CSMP.)

Schools have, for the most part, stopped teaching COBOL. A few do, but most moved on to C++, or Java, or C#. A number are now teaching Python.

Business have lots of COBOL code. Lots and lots of it. And they have no reason to convert that code to C++, or Java, or C#, or the "flavor of the month" in programming languages. Business code is often complex and working business code is precious. One modifies the code only when necessary, and one converts a system to a new language only at the utmost need.

But that code, while precious, does have to be maintained. Businesses change and those changes require fixes and enhancements to the code.

Those changes and enhancements are made by COBOL programmers.

Of which very few are being minted these days. Or for the past two decades.

Which means that COBOL programmers are, as a resource, dwindling.

Now, I recognize that the production of COBOL programmers has not ceased. There are three sources that I can name with little thought.

First are the schools (real-life and on-line) that offer courses in COBOL. Several colleges still teach it, and several on-line colleges offer it.

Second is offshore programming companies. Talent is available through outsourcing.

Third is existing programmers who learn COBOL. A programmer who knows Visual Basic and C++, for example, may choose to learn COBOL (perhaps through an on-line college).

Yet I believe that, in any given year, the number of new COBOL programmers is less than the number of retiring COBOL programmers. Which means that the talent pool is now at risk, and therefore business applications may be at risk.

For many years businesses relied on the ubiquitous nature of COBOL to build their systems. I'm sure that the managers considered COBOL to be a "safe" language: stable and reliable for many years. And to be fair, it was. COBOL has been a useful language for almost half a century, a record that only FORTRAN can challenge.

The dominance of COBOL drove a demand for COBOL programmers, which in turn drove a demand for COBOL training. Now, competing languages are pulling talent out of the "COBOL pool", starving the training. Can businesses be far behind?


If you are running a business, and you rely on COBOL, you may want to think about the future of your programming talent.

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Such an effect is not limited to COBOL. It can happen to any popular language. Consider Visual Basic,  a dominant language in Windows shops in the 1990s. It has fallen out of favor, replaced by C#. Or consider C++, which like COBOL has a large base of installed (and working) code. It, too, is falling out of favor, albeit much more slowly than Visual Basic or COBOL.