COBOL

COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language, has been around since the 1960s and 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. ...

Get Ubuntu Unleashed 2014 Edition: Covering 13.10 and 14.04,Ninth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.