New Cobol

There is a phenomena that has risen in the last few years which, unfortunately, has had a detrimental effect on the IT industry. For the sake of simplicity, I shall call it the rise of New COBOL.

Now, some of you may not know what COBOL is, so a short history lesson is required. COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) was developed in 1959, primarily for use by the U.S. government. It quickly spread and became the de facto standard upon which billions of lines of code were written. It was also, almost single handedly, responsible for the boom in the IT business prior to Y2K because of the number of lines of code written in COBOL. While it has been criticized as verbose, it is capable of handling most business problems currently encountered and is a perfectly valid language for developing applications.

New COBOL, however, is something which people should not want. New COBOL is actually the use of an object oriented language in a procedural way. Most newer languages are object oriented in that business logic and data are encapsulated within an object and that interaction with that object is done through methods. When the developer discards the object oriented nature of the development language and essentially writes procedure COBOL, but in a new language, we have New COBOL.

This perversion of the intent of an OO language causes many problems, not the least of which is an increase in maintenance costs due to the barrier imposed in understanding the purpose of the underlying code. If the application was written in an OO style than a maintenance individual could understand it and make changes relatively quickly. If, however, the application was written in a procedural manner, but with an OO language, methods and data do not appear where they "should be", resulting in a higher learning curve for the developer.

If you've chosen to develop in an OO language, make use of the facilities of that language. Failure to do so is a disservice to your client, as well as yourself.

I look forward to your comments on this one, as I know for a fact that certain architects disagree with my stance.