>>> On 2/1/2008 at 2:55 PM, in message
<0zMoj.64189$vt2.19285@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Judson
McClendon<judmc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> "Robert" <no@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>> I don't find it amusing. While and because old Cobolers were resisiting
>> change, the world abandoned Cobol. Note past tense; it already
happened.
>
> There were many other reasons for the demise of COBOL than resistance to
> change by old-timers. And I think a lot of the resistance was because
the
> old-timers knew that the new OO paradigm, for example, fit COBOL like a
> square peg in a round hole. I always knew that one of COBOL's greatest
> strengths was it's simplicity. Add OO, destroy the simplicity. The
> things
> that make COBOL great for its heyday are also things that do not fit
> current development paradigms. Another of COBOL's great strengths was
> the
> Data Division, and the ease and power of the hierarchical structures and
> data formatting in the Picture clause. But with standardized databases,
> XML, et al, those became irrelevant. Consider Pete Dashwood. He embraced
> and championed OO COBOL diligently for years. But Pete has abandoned
> COBOL for other languages better suited to today's development needs. I
> don't want to put words in Pete's mouth, but I don't think his decision
> had anything to do with resistance by old-timers; I believe it was based
> on pragmatic evaluation of the relative strengths of the tools in
> today's
> development environment. I've made a similar change. I still sup****t my
> clients who use COBOL, but I don't foresee developing any new systems in
> COBOL, except for those clients who want it. And they are steadily
> moving
> away from COBOL.
>
> To me it is clear that, if Old Cobolers, as you put it, had jumped on
> change as eagerly as anyone, we would still be watching COBOL's demise,
> maybe even sooner. Their openness to change would have propelled them
> inevitably to the same objective conclusions about current development
> realities that me, and I think Pete also, to change. COBOL, in any form,
> just does not fit well into today's webcentric development environment,
> and no one here feels more regret over the passing of that simpler era
> than I do.
Personally, I *wish* COBOL would die in my environment. Unfortunately,
unless we through out our current environment (mainframe VSE with CICS and
DL/I / VSAM) and migrate to a whole other platform we're pretty much
stuck,
since there are no modern languages available on VSE. (Not even C++! Not
that I'd recommend C++...)
We have begun the slow march toward DB2. It is my hope that someday we'll
have all of our data in DB2 and can then start migrating things away from
VSE and COBOL. But that is years down the road.
As you say, Cobol is simple. Unfortunately it's not powerful, at least
not
for many things.
Frank
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