An anniversary, of sorts

I stumbled upon this article, alebit a day or two late, and thought it was an appropriate anniversary to celebrate.

The article is about COBOL, a pretty ancient coding language by technology standards. It recently celebrated it's 50th anniversary.

The author states that though most people have never heard of COBOL, it accounts for about 80% of of the world's active code. To put that into context, you need a lot more lines of COBOL code to do the same thing that Java or C could do in about 2 lines.

The author also states that he has never met an active COBOL programmer in his life.

So why did I take note of this anniversary?

Because I was once a professional COBOL programmer. Yes, I was a pitifully awful COBOL programmer, but nonetheless, it was my job for the first 2 years of my professional experience.

Amar actually hates it when I mention that I was a programmer, because he doesn't really think that my "experience" counted. But I beg to differ.

I was a business major in college, and for some reason, my employer thought it best to put me into a very technical role. I floundered for quite awhile and asked pretty much anyone I could find if they could assist me. I wrote my first algorithm in COBOL. I ran my first batch job in COBOL. I performed my first 20 installs for COBOL projects.

And I hated it for the most part.

But looking back, I can see how has contributed to my current job as a Project Manager. In short, it has helped me be a better Project Manager.

Anyhow, sometimes you have to go through some messy stuff to get to the good stuff. It was just funny to realize that it's a 50 year old programming language that gave me my first foot in the door to corporate America.