Teaching program design through program structure maps
Stuart A. Varden · 1979
It is well known that college and university level programs in the computing sciences continue to turn out graduates who are schooled in topics such as compiler writing, automata theory and numerical analysis, while the vast majority of potential employers of these graduates are seeking people knowledgeable in administrative systems and application programming. This point was brought home during a recent visit I made to a graduate course in data structures at a major university. When the instructor asked the more than forty students to list all the programming languages they knew, COBOL went entirely unmentioned. Although COBOL is not an ideal language for instructional purposes, the fact that it is rarely taught in computing science programs is probably due more to the tastes of instructors than to intrinsic weaknesses of COBOL. My remarks here take the position that COBOL can be used quite successfully as a demonstration language to help teach information processing principles and good programming practices, while providing students with a much sought after skill.