> http://www.cobolscript.com/
>
> Why DO people persist in using Cobol?
Simple: Human capital.
We've seen this in dozens of field studies that we've done on
programmers. There is a huge cost to retraining the existing human
capital. If you can leverage the capital without retraining, then
you've got a great advantage.
While VB is a simple language, it is fundementally different from
COBOL. And since VB 4 and the introduction of classes, this becomes
very difficult.
COBOL is a language which many users can be exceptionally productive
without a fundemental understanding of many basic programming
concepts (like functions, arrays, or inheretance). Therefore, the
startup time is trivial. Because of the punch-card approach to life,
it has an easy integration with data.
So, you can take someone who is a logical thinker off the street, sit
them down in a 5 week cobol course, and start getting useful work out
of them. This is a huge advantage that there are very few
replacements for today.
You can do the same thing with a VB course, and many do. It's just
that taking a COBOL programmer to VB is the equivalent of throwing
them out and starting from scratch. Why waste the COBOL programmers?
Jared
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Jared M. Spool User Interface Engineering
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 800 Turnpike Street, Suite 101
(978) 975-4343 North Andover, MA 01845
fax: (978) 975-5353 USA
http://www.uie.com
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