Last night I had a dream during which someone suggested that COBOL would make a good first programming language. They tried to promote the data division and English language syntax as plusses. When I shared this on social media it got a lot of laughs. Few would take this as a serious idea and with good reason.
We used to joke that the hardest part of programming in COBOL was learning how to spell environment. (You had to be there) But really that data division was a bear to get right. The cognitive load was a lot for beginners. Today they are some who think that static variable declarations are enough cognitive load to hold students back and COBOL was a lot of effort.
COBOL is still around and I understand that it has changed somewhat. I thought that “Structured Programming in COBOL” (there was such a book) was a stretch but object oriented COBOL just boggles my mind.
Most of the people in my age group in the industry have some experience with COBOL. For more than a few it was the first or second or, as in my case, third programming language. Learning multiple programming languages was a big thing early in my career. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, and C (before C++) were all a part of many people’s tool box. I worked on one project that had code in all four of those languages plus PASCAL.
Today we have a lot of new languages. C++. C#, Java, JavaScript, Rust, and I could go on and on. Today’s languages have more and more powerful decision structures, looping structures and libraries that do things for us that we used to have to program ourselves. We have improved error handling, the ability to use classes and objects, and many other cool features. That doesn’t even touch on powerful IDEs and the ability to compile and get results in seconds rather than hours and days.
With power often comes complexity. Complexity means cognitive load and potential for confusion and errors. We walk a fine line determining what to teach and how to prevent students from getting overloaded. It’s an exciting time to be teaching for sure.
3 comments:
The one thing that COBOL had that made it a powerful data processing language was the “move corresponding” statement. It allowed one to transfer data fields from one data record to another where the data items were named the same.
https://www.itprotoday.com/programming-languages/cobol-language-still-demand-application-modernization-efforts-take-hold
I have been in spaces where there is currently a debate over whether or not to switch CS classes at the secondary level to use Python instead of Java. When I talk to people in industry, they tend to scoff at the idea of teaching Python where things aren't strictly typed. It's a much easier language to learn, but at what cost? Definitely an interesting debate.
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