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

tim <TimJ@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:13t9o34h59fed18@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 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.
>

(Tongue in cheek!)

I dunno.  Looked at in one way there has been nothing new in computing for
a
long, long time.  Way back when, the Whirlwind and other pioneering
machines
had a very small instruction set - often just 32 instructions.  This of
course expanded as time went by until somebody invented the RISC concept -
cutting down the number and complexity of the instructions.  The first
mass-storage devices used fixed-length records, short sectors, and
absolute
addressing.  Twenty years later, IBM reinvented the same thing but callled
it FBA.  Once upon a time there was a central machine and dumb terminals.
This was reintroduced as client-server (I think so anyway, because I have
never seen a standard definition).  There used to be service bureaux: now
it's software as a service and computing on demand, or even the cloud.  So
who knows?  Procedural programming is not dead yet, nor is Cobol: we only
have to wait for someone to repackage it as the Next Great Thing.  What
would be great is to be that someone.  The riches, the guru status!

PL