Re: J4 - presentation/discussion on "Future of the COBOL Standard"

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:07:03 +1300, Pete Dashwood wrote:

> I won't be copying Bob Karlin, but here's what I think, anyway :-)
> 
> I think their idea to rejuvenate the standard is not a bad one, but to 
> expect COBOL to move into a world of objects and components, when there
is 
> no user interest in the OO features of it, is simply myopic.
>

I tend to agree - a new standard should be looking to take the rough edges
off and not much more. 2002 was a huge over-reach. There is no
constituency
for major new additions to COBOL, as evidenced by the fact 2002 has not
been fully implemented by anybody.

Agree with you about XML also. XML was possibly exciting in about 1999. In
practice it is very cumbersome to use, and I don't see the XML proposals
for COBOL solving this.

COBOL is not a good candidate for running on JVMs and .NET due to
technical problems ie use of redefine and pointers (which are in effect
arbitrary redefines), also packed decimal which is not well sup****ted off
the mainframe. You can make it work, but it will run slowly.

> Line by line development and maintenance of code is non-viable as a
forward 
> strategy, and the only place where there is likely to be a COBOL market 
for 
> some time yet is in Legacy and re-factoring or re-wrapping Legacy so it
can 
> run in modern environments like .NET/Mono.
> 
> Despite the claim of billions of lines of existing code (dubious at
best; it 
> has been eroded yearly for the last 5 years (at least...) at a rate of 
> millions of lines every year, by replacement with packaged solutions, 
> refactoring, and migration to Java and other solutions...), even the
most 
> optimistic observer cannot see an expanding future for COBOL as a
procedural 
> paradigm based language in a world that is increasingly more visual and
more 
> non-procedural.
> 

I would suggest, without having proof, that there are probably more lines
of code being written per year across all languages than ever before.
Packages and components are very useful but a lot of code is still needed.

My observation of big companies is that the COBOL base is going away very
slowly. I have seen things replaced by packages, but a lot of the packages
were written some time ago, in a language called COBOL.

It is hard to replace a custom application that is deeply embedded into
your business processes with a package. Look at the many debacles with SAP
implementations for some examples.

If the 200bn lines of code number is anywhere near right, the dollars
involved in replacing them is frightening. The cost is probably in the
$10-50 trillion dollar range.

Tim