Well, I've got an opinion on just about everything. I haven't seen good COBOL code (and I've seen a lot, so far). To me that's enough evidence of some tremendous failure, somewhere--organizational or design. That isn't to suggest that bad code is exclusively in COBOL's domain. I've seen exponentially more code in C, Perl, Ruby, etc. Plenty of stuff resembled what you might find in a Roman Vomitorium, but it's been very easy to find some beautiful, modular, well-crafted stuff at any company.
Unless it's being managed by CIS majors and a dozen Indian VB.NET lackeys. Then the stuff should be nuked from orbit. If you have some "what jesus would write if he used cobol" then I'm happy to see it. My big motive for advocating Java is the Object-Oriented libraries that you can build and your ability to export that to other systems if the business case ever presents itself, with only minor changes necessary. Scott On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Steve Comstock <[email protected]>wrote: > Scott wrote: > >> I'm not necessarily arguing for leaving the Mainframe, but cleaning up the >> dungheap of COBOL is long overdue and now *is* the time for that. >> Accenture >> is only a company you hire if you want an offshore entity to cook your >> books >> while you bankrupt your stockholders. Accenture is just another batch of >> MBA salesmen, out to plunder anything that's good or decent in the world. >> >> > Well, I know that you and I disagree on this somewhat, but I > think that COBOL has evolved to be a pretty nifty language > for what it's designed to do: automate business rules. > > Modern COBOL can handle Unicode, ASCII, and XML. It can run > as CGIs on the web. And well written COBOL is easier to > read than almost any other programming language. > > > I know we do agree that there's plenty of ugly COBOL code out > there (and there is plenty of ugly code out there in many > languages). Frankly, with the training business down so badly > I would be interested in looking at doing some COBOL code > modernization: updating existing code so it follows modern > COBOL capabilities. Not automated, just manually fixing the > code. > > Guess there's no accounting for taste! :-) > > > > > -- > > Kind regards, > > -Steve Comstock > The Trainer's Friend, Inc. > > 303-393-8716 > http://www.trainersfriend.com > > z/OS Application development made easier > * Our classes include > + How things work > + Programming examples with realistic applications > + Starter / skeleton code > + Complete working programs > + Useful utilities and subroutines > + Tips and techniques > > ==> Ask about being added to our opt-in list: <== > ==> * Early announcement of new courses <== > ==> * Early announcement of new techincal papers <== > ==> * Early announcement of new promotions <== > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO > Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
