Re: Boss thinks COBOL leading edge in..

> ken <75333.350@CompuServe.COM> writes: > Just my opinion.... In my short (6 years) in data processing I > have found that of all of the "high level languages" (COBOL, C, > PASCAL....) programming in COBOL tends to be the most productive > for the time spent developing. As far as COBOL being dead, most C bigots > would be stunned by the ammount of COBOL development going on > today. A good guage of what kind of development is going on in > what languages is your sunday paper employment section, look at > what companies are asking for... > > I have found that the reason that most developers want to abandon > "old" languages has more to do with trendiness and resume > building than any real need. > >>>> Ken, for a person of such development years, you show the sagacity of a veteran. Twenty five years ago when I was at University, one of our number asked our Professor when we were going to learn COBOL ( we were struggling with ALGOL, Assembler, and some weird home grown compilers then). His answer was " Why do you want to learn COBOL for, it's like Latin, a dead language. In a few years time, everyone will be progranmming in PASCAL". Every five years or so, someone makes a similar pronouncement about COBOL. We have had LISP, ADA, PL/1, C , any sort of OO language , Smalltalk, C++ , all touted at various stages as the new wonder language. As much as vendors hate to admit it, the world is driven by the users. While there are billions of lines of COBOL lying around, someone has to maintain them. And they will be with us yet. People will argue with you as to whether COBOL is more productive than C, I mean there are still people who belive we should all be writing assembler on CP/M systems. The fact is, there just aint no universal laws of programming. The bottom line is does the ?$*&!@ thing work? End users don't give a rat's arse as to what a system was developed in. Mick Muller Standard disclaimers apply here (whats a disclaimer anyway??). "Gaze outwards to the stars, not inwards to your navel" (Bill Borthwick)