Major organisations such as the Dutch Tax Administration and UWV urgently need programmers who can work with the old COBOL language. Retraining programmes, often with a job guarantee, are meant to help fill that gap.
Why is there such a shortage of COBOL specialists? Part of the answer is the age of the language. Mathematician Grace Hopper helped design COBOL so it would resemble normal English as much as possible. That made it much more accessible than earlier ways of giving computers instructions. Many people with a technical background still look down on COBOL because it is simple and newer languages often seem more exciting.
COBOL still has a future, according to computer science professor Chris Verhoef. For processing millions of transactions quickly, the language remains particularly well suited. Rabobank programmer Stefan de Hoogt also calls COBOL a very stable language. It is relatively efficient too, because it needs little computing power for certain tasks, which also saves electricity.
COBOL was developed in 1959 on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, with Grace Murray Hopper among the key contributors. It was intended to be easier to read, write and maintain than common languages of the time, such as assembly language and FORTRAN, while also being usable on multiple types of computers. The first version, COBOL-60, dates from 1960.
The most recent known version is from 2014, adding features such as dynamic tables.
Many business-critical applications around the world were built in COBOL. A 2006 study found that 16 percent of IT managers wanted to phase COBOL out immediately, 36 percent wanted to phase it out gradually, and another 25 percent were held back by cost considerations.
