COBOL

COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language, has been around since the 1960s, is one of the oldest programming languages, and is still the dominant language for (legacy) business applications. The majority of big business applications, such as payroll and accounting, were written in COBOL, and most programmers who knew it well have retired. A job market exists for younger programmers willing to learn it and willing to support older applications that are stable and trusted and still running all over the place. This is especially true if you are able to understand the business processes modeled in COBOL and can integrate it with modern technology, which isn’t always an easy task.

COBOL’s syntax was designed to mimic natural human language. Often a newcomer can read COBOL source code and have a pretty good idea of what it does, even if the reader has little to no programming experience. An interesting feature in early COBOL that is deprecated in more recent versions is self-modifying code, which had the potential to create some interesting situations. COBOL has always been a little controversial, as illustrated by the time that Edsger Dijkstra remarked that “the use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”