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◈ALB Atlas

COBOL Maintenance

COBOL
KindProgramming language
Appeared1959
StatusMaintenance
CreatorCODASYL committee / Grace Hopper et al
FamilyCOBOL

The English-prose business language that still settles most of the world's daily transactions — mocked since 1960, irreplaceable since 1960.

Influenced by FLOW-MATIC COMTRAN
Created by Grace Hopper
Influenced PL/I

CODASYL's COBOL (1959) — designed by committee in six months — made business computing English-readable: ADD, COMPUTE, PERFORM. Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC was its closest ancestor.\n\nIt is still the largest deployed codebase on Earth — an estimated hundreds of billions of lines in production — and 65+ years later Y2K-era fears about its maintainers' retirement remain current.

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