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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/29/2016 2:11 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 11/28/16 11:14 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> 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 know, I did it.
>
>>
>> I wrote CGI in Fortran 20 years ago.
>
> You can write CGI in any language.  But fast and dirty is the
> mantra and thus we have all these security disasters running
> on the web.

CGI is usually a lot more fast and dirty and insecure than more
modern approaches.

>> But it does not cut it in todays web world.
>
> See comment above.  It is up to the programmers to fix this.
> But the big question is "Why doesn't it cut it in todays web world?"
> My guess is for the same reason COBOL is seen to be in decline.

CGI model can not provide good performance.

No libraries and no template language will make it extremely
expensive to maintain.

>>> 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.
>
> Really? I thought I mentioned it here, but maybe it was somewhere
> else.  The place in GA I went to do COBOL for a few months just went
> thru their fourth attempt to find a replacement.  Not one qualified
> applicant.

I have no idea about why they can't fill that job.

But if you look at salaries offered, then I think you will
see that COBOL does not seem to have a demand exceeding supply
problem.

>             Is the COBOL going away?  I asked about that because I
> have a scheme that would make it possible with minimal impact on the
> users.  Their answer: "No, it is not going away.  It will just sit
> there and run like it has since I left 4 years ago."  This is
> problematic in itself but does show that people are not rushing to
> get rid of their COBOL.

It is common not to rush to get of something working.

But the development jobs are not in stuff running, but in
new application being developed and old applications being
actively maintained.

>>                                             Apparently
>> COBOL development is declining at a rate similar to
>> number of COBOL programmers.
>
> Not that I have seen.  I can find ads for COBOL Programmers anytime
> I look.  I know of at least two major COBOL users who are constantly
> advertising and hiring COBOL programmers.

There are some.

But look at the big numbers.

dice.com jobs:

Java - 15397
C# - 6733
PHP - 2334
COBOL - 434

> The problem with COBOL is academia, not the language.  Somewhere along
> the line it was decided to kill COBOL.  They stopped teaching it and
> went so far s to start telling students that even learning it would
> ruin their career prospects (Yeah, can you believe that learning
> anything in addition to whatever else  you studied could do that!)

Hmmm.

I don't see the big correlation between languages teached at
universities and what companies actually use.

Pascal was a huge teaching language before OOP. Never hit
it in business.

Haskell and OCAML are very popular at universities today.
Practically unused outside.

Arne