Talk:COBOL

COBOL was one of the Engineering and technology good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
May 16, 2014	Peer review	Not reviewed
February 2, 2015	Peer review	Reviewed
February 10, 2015	Good article nominee	Listed
June 16, 2024	Good article reassessment	Delisted
A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on April 8, 2019.
Current status: Delisted good article

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GA concerns

After reviewing this article, I am concerned that it no longer meets the GA criteria. My concerns are listed below:

The lede is several paragraphs long with lots of information added since it passed GAN in 2015. Can this be formatted to better conform to WP:LEDE?
The "COBOL 60" section is quite bloated: while it was large when it passed GAN in 2015, it seems to have gotten larger since then and contains many short paragraphs. Is anyone interested in reducing and/or removing information?
There is some uncited information.

Anyone interested in fixing up this article? If not it might be nominated to WP:GAR. Pinging the GAN nominator @EdwardH:. Z1720 (talk) 01:23, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GA Reassessment

COBOL

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: No improvement Real4jyy (talk) 05:26, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article contains a bloated lede (as well as other sections), an orange tag outlining missing information from 2021, and many uncited statements. I posted my concerns on the article talk page, but there was no response. Z1720 (talk) 15:37, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Citation 14 and related text

Has anyone noticed that this paragraph makes little sense, is potential misinformation, and is quoting a citation which opens with a disclaimer from the author informing the reader that it's an eighth grade essay? I think it should probably go. Acidbass12 (talk) 05:07, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

COBOL syntax designed for "management" to read

Is there any evidence of this in COBOL's design record? The 1960 report says "The COBOL System allows the user to prepare his specifications for the problem solution in the language most natural to him - namely English," and "[The procedure division] allows the user to express his thoughts in meaningful English.… That is, any user of COBOL can understand the information appearing in this division without regard to any particular computer." There is no clear reference to management here, but rather to high-level programmers essentially as they exist today. It's misleading to call such people "management" only because they oversaw human compilers before they had automatic ones. When I worked as an electrical engineer, the fact that I handed off soldering work to technicians did not make me their manager. 2601:642:4F84:1590:2438:9E10:1872:2571 (talk) 00:45, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]