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 DD). 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:
Don't worry, I won't be. I may be recruiting for it, but I prefer to
play with my Linux boxen and if necessary a few windows servers.
Are you aware of these projects?
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. :=)
In what sick world is COBOL the best?
Mike/
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