Don't tell me that Linux can run on old computers, I know this. But in the business world your choice of software is not always a choice, and if your vendor doesn't support Linux yet, you have to be "current" for the latest version. And I'm not talking about Microsoft Office, or Lotus 123, or such, I'm talking about major software investments into application software designed for certain systems. In my case, working for a bank, I'm talking Teller systems, loan document processing, and other such software. Software requiring an initial investment of $50,000 or more.
As for bugginess of "our" AS/400 software, it depends on the vendor (as it does in the PC world). For the most part our software is quite bug free and the few bugs that do happen are quickly resolved and do not reappear. But, we do have a vendor that does have buggy software and we are shopping for replacement software.
As for the mind set of older programs, I agree with you. Even I catch myself being more "top down" programming now and then. They say it is harder for established programmers, use to top down programming, to move to OOP systems. I think I am making it slowly.
Benjamin Story wrote:
The biggest thing holding back Linux in the enterprise when it comes
to replacing big iron is that it's biggest proponent also sells the
AS/400s that cost $50,000 and are worth $5,000 once you open the crate
(I'm not exagerating much on this, our accountants hate the
depreciation on our AS/400).
Our shop is 99.999% COBOL and RPG(no not D&D). One thing that irks me about this fact is that the programs running on the AS/400 are generally buggier than even Microsoft code because (no offense to the older programmers on this list), most of the COBOL coders are set in the mindset of how programming was done 20 years ago. Error handling? Oh you mean having a 24/7 computer operator to tell the program to ignore bad data when it crashes because of it. A good modern programmer with COBOL knowledge can be pretty well set in the job market right now.
On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 06:56:39PM -0500, Bob Ackerman wrote:
I don't think anyone said COBOL was the best, but there are so many systems out there still using it. Yes, the impression is that PCs rule the world, yet many business people know that for all the thousands of PCs out there there are hundreds of AS/400s and mainframes driving large scale systems, and they run COBOL and RPG (and C, C++, Perl, etc.).
Yes I agree that Linux is cool, its the best, and it's going to kick Microsoft where Bill needs to be kicked. But, as IBM realized, that the Linux community is started to, interaction with legacy large scale systems is a requirement for the success of Linux. Linux won't replace them, Linux will work with them.
Bob Ackerman
Ian Monroe wrote:
On Tuesday 07 October 2003 10:50, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In what sick world is COBOL the best?Don't worry, I won't be. I may be recruiting for it, but I prefer toAre you aware of these projects?
play with my Linux boxen and if necessary a few windows servers.
http://www.open-cobol.org/
http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net/
Check out the status pages for COBOL-85 compliance.
And there are commercial COBOL compilers available for "non-PC" platforms. In COBOL-speak, that means the IBM zSeries - which runs Linux as the OS.
Now you can combine the best of both worlds - COBOL *AND* Linux. :=)
Mike/
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