Day 291: Archaic Language

This is a short program for adding two numbers written in a programming language called COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language. This language was designed back in 1959, the same year that first magnetic disk drive went into development.

This washer/drier sized monster probably stored about a megabyte of data.

I bring this up because COBOL is still in use today by the IRS. Tax season ends today, and it got me thinking about some of the more archaic bits of language we still use. Computers develop so fast that their languages go out of use in mere decades rather than the centuries it takes for a human language to become obsolete. It's really a miracle anybody still knows how to use this crap. That 30 line piece of code up there that can only add two numbers together is pretty brutal just to look at. I can't even imagine it being my job. Thankfully, our language is a lot friendlier to read, write, and delve into earlier iterations. It's charming even, to read old books and see someone use a word like 'forthwith' or 'thusly' or when they use slang that nobody really understands anymore. Old books use this pattern I wish would come back that goes something like this:

"Presently, he did x, y, and z."

The presently doesn't really add anything. You could just say he did x, y, and z. But it's a nice little segue whenever you've written something about the past and need to make absolutely clear that the sentences thereafter are 'presently.' It's little changes like these that stack up over the years and eventually result in a completely new language. Check out this renaissance recipe for pancakes that I found from this blog.

Take new thicke creame a pint, foure or five yolks of efs, a good handfull or flower and two or three spoonefuls of ale, strain them together into a faire platter, and season it with a good handfull of sugar, a spoonful of synamon, and a little ginger: then take a frying pan, and put in a little peece of butter, as big as your thombe, and when it it molten brason, cast it out of your pan, and with a ladle put to the further side of your pan some of your stuffe, and hold your pan alope, so that your stuffe may run abroad over all the pan as thin as may be: then set it to the fire, and let the fyre be verie soft, and when the one side is baked, the turn the other, and bake them as fast as you can without burning.

Kinda charming right? Fyre, and verie, and foure. These words are basically the same as our words, just spelled a little differently.

What's the difference though? Why are old computer languages ugly and annoying while older human language is pretty with a hint of nostalgia? For one thing, I think in part it could be because the hardware doesn't change very much. Humans are as humans were thousands of years ago. That disc drive up there is a far cry from it's modern descendants, but you or I could probably be mistaken for a person born a thousand years ago if we were put side by side.

It's also a false comparison when you really think about it. Using COBOL is less like using the phrase 'can you dig it?' and more like trying to write to someone in ancient Sumerian. It'll take a real connoisseur to appreciate what you're doing, and only then if it's not important. Imagine sending a friend an important message about how you're going to be arrested if you don't get a certain amount of money, including detailed steps about how to get the money, where to send it, and how much you need. But then, your friend receives this letter in ancient Sumerian, gets confused about the tricky steps that need to be taken, and sends the wrong amount of money. Then you get arrested and thrown in jail.

This is what happens if the IRS updates the tax code and puts a new bug in their COBOL based system that does tax accounting for the 158 million Americans in the US working population. Of course, nobody will even notice if your tax return is wrong unless it's wrong in the millions of dollars, so there's that at least.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley