100 years of birth 'mother tongue' COBOL language

For the majority of people working in IT, COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) belongs to the past. However, the author of this programming language is probably very happy to know that it is still the nucleus of countless commercial trading software.

Grace Hopper was dubbed the 'mother of COBOL' with great contributions both in theory and practice in programming language. She created an important turning point in the IT industry when she found a compilation method in an era that people only knew about computer programs implemented by the method of interpreting each line at a time.

Grace Hopper (December 9, 1906 - January 1, 1992).

Hopper studied Mathematics and Physics at Yale University (USA) and taught at Vassar College before joining the Navy in 1943. There, she became one of the first computer programmers in the world. gender has the opportunity to work with one of the earliest established computer systems in history: Harvard Mark 1.

She continued to interact with Harvard Mark 2 until 1949 and then moved to another company and worked on the Univac System 1, where she began developing the translation system. Hopper then returned to the US Navy and it was here that COBOL was born based on the idea that software should be written with easy-to-understand command lines instead of functions and numbers. As a result, even entrepreneurs can write the software they need.

' Currently, COBOL continues to be used in enterprise management applications ,' said Jullian Dobbins, Product Manager of Micro Focus, one of the US COBOL support companies. ' According to research firm Gartner, 75% of commercial transactions are being done through COBOL command lines, such as in ATM cash machine software. COBOL works very well because it's easy to control errors every time something goes wrong '.

Today, modern programming languages ​​like C / C ++ are gradually replacing COBOL because it is no longer suitable for new development directions such as web service or service-oriented architecture (SOA).