Synopsis
The development of COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) was the strangest, wildest, and most dramatic story in the early history of computing. Everlasting Code covers it all, from Grace Hopper’s pioneering work with compilers to the many contentious committee meetings that repeatedly put the birth of the language in jeopardy; from the race to build the world’s first COBOL compiler to the numerous standardization efforts; and from the Y2K bug to the COVID-19 pandemic, times when public scapegoating of COBOL shifted into high gear.
Even though it was the work of a committee and she was only indirectly involved in its creation, COBOL has Grace Hopper’s fingerprints all over it. Therefore, since Everlasting Code tells two interrelated stories (that of Hopper’s breakthroughs as well as the history of COBOL), the book is split into two parts.
In the first part, we meet one of the most prolific computer scientists of the twentieth century and examine how Hopper’s varied life experiences--as a student, professor, military officer, and programmer--led to her revolutionary ideas, setting the stage for the birth of COBOL.
Hopper developed some of the earliest working compilers--programs that translated human-readable source code into machine code, a language computers could make sense of--including MATH-MATIC, for algebraic problems, and FLOW-MATIC, for data processing. Source code for Hopper’s compilers had to be written in a form of everyday English, which proved eminently readable to some people and endlessly frustrating for others.
FLOW-MATIC was the key influence for COBOL, as we discover in the second part of Everlasting Code. By the late 1950s, with the FORTRAN programming language dominating the engineering, scientific, and mathematical landscape, the need for a corresponding business data-processing language emerged. With Grace Hopper’s full support, in early 1959 a programmer named Mary Hawes publicly suggested developing an industrywide common business language (CBL) capable of running the same programs on different computers. Thanks to Hopper’s many government and military connections, the U.S. Department of Defense sponsored the CBL effort, taking the unprecedented step of bringing together many competing manufacturers and computer users for a high-stakes meeting at the Pentagon.
Before long, subcommittees of CODASYL (the Committee on Data Systems Languages, which was formed to write the CBL) were at war with each other. Meanwhile, the chairman of CODASYL received a mysterious crated package. Inside was a tombstone with a reclining lamb statuette at the top and a single word engraved on the front: COBOL. Was this intended as a threat? Did someone want the language dead? Or was the tombstone merely delivering a warning: That if CODASYL couldn’t get its act together, COBOL was sure to die an early death?
Author Mark Jones Lorenzo takes you behind the scenes and inside the meeting rooms where the fate of a programming language hung in the balance. Filled with intrigue, conflict, suspense, drama, technical details, and the biographies of many larger-than-life personalities, Everlasting Code traces the precedents, the development, and the history of the COBOL programming language, which came to rule the world.