[Info-vax] Variable declarations, was: Re: improving EDT

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/23/2016 11:49 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> Don't do .Net or J2EE.  Web integration doesn't require it anyway.
> I have written web programs in COBOL.  I converted a broken PHP
> program that was used for the Department's High School Programming
> Contest into COBOL just as a "proof of concept". (Remember the comment
> earlier about the maintainability, or lack thereof, of PHP. A change
> in PHP with a new version broke the running script.  The student who
> wrote it couldn't figure out what it actually did in order to fix it.
> 2 students and a professor spent days trying to fix it.  I wrote my
> COBOL version in about a half hour.  I wrote a version is Bourne Shell
> using awk, which is still running today, in about 15 minutes.

You can write CGI scripts in COBOL.

I wrote CGI in Fortran 20 years ago.

But it does not cut it in todays web world.

> The only place COBOL is dead is academia.  They are already feeling
> the pinch from tech/trade schools.  I can see a future (not to
> distant)  where they will start teaching things like COBOL and
> academia will feel the bite even more.  No one comes out of a trade
> school with $100,000 in debt and no prospects for a real job.

There has been a lot of talk about the problem of COBOL
programmers retiring resulting in a shortage.

But it seems like it has not materialized. Apparently
COBOL development is declining at a rate similar to

number of COBOL programmers.

Arne