Re: [vcf-midatlantic] COBOL: vintage vs. legacy code
My dad's happily retired for about 25 years now. Some of his COBOL IBM mainframe code is STILL IN PRODUCTION. Why? Because of the investment of untold man-YEARS of effort, debugging and diligence to yield nearly bullet-proof code. Because the code implements algorithms and logic that's no longer documented or understood by anyone else. Porting code introduces new bugs, thus IBM's captive audience with all the new mainframes ALWAYS being "backwards compatible".
It's not obsolete as long as it's *not* too much trouble to maintain.
There's a whole wild and wacky world of backwards compatible retrofits to "legacy systems". Screen scraping interfaces new apps to programs that still think they're talking to 3270 "green screen" terminals. Dave McGuire:
Organizations are using it for a reason: It's the right tool for their job, based on whatever criteria they've set forth.
FORTH? Did somebody say FORTH :-) Most of my dad's career was writing COBOL programs. I'll never have that stability in today's "language of the month" club: Perl, Python, Go, Ruby on Rails, Java and all its variants and environments, ADA (before it was a fruit), FORTRAN/RATFOR/WATFIV, ... -- Jeff Jonas
On 05/22/2017 10:53 PM, Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Most of my dad's career was writing COBOL programs. I'll never have that stability in today's "language of the month" club: Perl, Python, Go, Ruby on Rails, Java and all its variants and environments, ADA (before it was a fruit), FORTRAN/RATFOR/WATFIV, ...
[sorry, got busy here] The "language of the month" problem existed back in the "good old days" too, but they didn't have the Internet to spread the ideas, and there were far fewer kids with no experience but huge egos running around trying to reinvent/redesign everything because "those old farts couldn't possibly have known what they were doing back then". (systemd also comes to mind) I'm shocked Python actually caught on, with some of its awful design decisions (whitespace as a syntactic element, really?), but it pretty much won the war of the trendy scripting languages. That's probably a safe long-term bet now due to the inertia it has established. Thank heaven Perl has finally died. God that was awful. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 7:53 PM, Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Java and all its variants and environments,
I've been writing Java for almost 20 years and fully expect to be writing in it for another 10.
On 05/31/2017 01:47 PM, Joseph S. Barrera III via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Java and all its variants and environments,
I've been writing Java for almost 20 years and fully expect to be writing in it for another 10.
I won't speak for Jeff, but I think the point he was trying to make about Java was its massive moving target set of libraries. I've seen so many APIs come and go in the Java world that it's ridiculous. It's very important to separate the language from the libraries, but the Java world doesn't seem to do that. While the language has remained more or less static, and rather nice, the API world is nothing short of absurd in its level of indiscipline. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On May 31, 2017, at 1:47 PM, Joseph S. Barrera III via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I've been writing Java for almost 20 years and fully expect to be writing in it for another 10.
Lol! I was going to make this exact same comment...same number of years too!
Assuming we don't all blow ourselves up first. On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 4:17 PM, Peter Cetinski via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On May 31, 2017, at 1:47 PM, Joseph S. Barrera III via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I've been writing Java for almost 20 years and fully expect to be writing in it for another 10.
Lol! I was going to make this exact same comment...same number of years too!
participants (5)
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Dave McGuire -
Jeffrey Jonas -
Joseph S. Barrera III -
Peter Cetinski -
william degnan