Cobol is a crusty, ancient programming language that was designed to be easy for non-programmers to use, but ended up being a specialized skill all its own. It's often the butt of jokes among modern developers, but hey, at least it's not as bad as PHP!

How to use it in a sentence

• I asked ChatGPT to generate a Cobol program for me, but it just laughed and said, "Sorry, I don't do legacy systems. Maybe try asking on a programming forum from the 1970s?"

• My boss said we need to maintain this Cobol codebase because it's "mission-critical", but I'm pretty sure he just doesn't want to admit that nobody knows how it works anymore.

If you actually want to learn more...

• CobolInference - Martin Fowler discusses the historical aim of Cobol to enable non-programmers to write software, and why that didn't quite pan out.

• The Blub Paradox - Paul Graham explores why powerful languages like Lisp aren't universally adopted, using Cobol as an example of a less powerful "high-level" language.

• Resources for Lisp and Scheme - Paul Graham provides a list of resources related to various programming languages, in case you want to explore alternatives to Cobol.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.