The cri de coeur of Clark Morris presents a view, articulated more
sympathetically than is usual, that I for one do sympathize with. Moreover, he
has identified the key issue, which is that of interoperability/data transfer
and thus data-type compatibility in a mixed-language environment.
Do all of these many millions of lines of COBOL code have no more future than
that of cuneiform tablets, written in Akkadian, that were unearthed at El
Amarna? He fears that this is the case, and I am sure of it.
He is also right that the academics will not mourn---To the extent that they
pay any attention they will rejoice at---the disappearance of COBOL, and too
many of their criticisms of it are just.
Still, what is problematic is not so much COBOL, which can be but seldom is
written well, as the business IT subculture, which is determinedly ad hoc and
Luddite and quite capable of replicating its characteristic vices in C and
Java. (I have seen, and saved in my black museum, LISP routines written by
quondam COBOL programmers that are immediately recognizable as such, as some
COBOL routines still in use are equally recognizable as having been written
originally in Autocoder.)
Celebrations of the death of COBOL would, moreover, be premature. It is
moribund, but its death agonies will be protracted over the next several
lustra.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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