COBOL, or the Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in use.

It certainly is not as flashy as Sun Microsystem’s Java, and the language is not useful for the development of Internet applications. However, the programming language has quite a few uses left. Though it was once criticized for its use of what some programmers saw as an over complicated text, the language actually tries to exhibit an element of humanism in its construction. The text is actually designed to be human readable, even though COBOL is not necessarily an interpreted language. COBOL received a major face lift in 2002, and it is this added object-oriented style that has given the programming language a second chance at life. Support for Bit, Boolean, Floating Point, user defined functions, and portable arithmetic calculations was added into the language. Perhaps, in the future, some applications will once more flock to the 1959 stand by for computer programming.