[Info-vax] The Gender Fluid IT Crisis

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/29/2017 4:25 PM, seasoned_geek wrote:
> Not so much pitching my blog as pointing out the current IT crisis
> which is bigger than Y2K ever was. Used to be quite a few IT management
> types here.
> 
> http://www.logikalsolutions.com/wordpress/information-technology/the-gender-fluid-it-crisis/

<quote>
IT workers put in millions and millions of hours fixing things 
incompetent management was too greedy to fix.
</quote>

Guess what. In most companies the IT workers do what management tell
them and Y2K issues got fixed because management told iT workers
to fix them.

<quote>
For COBOL programmers with extensive copylibs this won’t be much of a 
problem. COBOL never had the concept of a boolean, or at least it didn’t 
in the early standards versions. All you had was PIC X or 9 and a bunch 
of 88 levels.
...
You poor bastards using a database though. How many of you have that 
stored in a boolean column? How many stored procedures are you going to 
have to try and find both in production and development? Not just in the 
database, but where they are actually called, tracking back to fix every 
data type along the way?

You poor bastards using BASIC, FORTRAN or some other language where some 
fool decided bit-flags should be used to store boolean values. That’s 
all over your system. You cannot even hope to search by name through the 
code because not everyone will have used the named mask.
</quote>

Crap.

Practically no one use BOOLEAN for storing sex even if that
data type is available. BOOLEAN is for storing TRUE or FALSE
not anything with two values.

ENUM, CHAR, INT is what is used for what is truly
an enumeration. None of these have problems with more
than two values.

Arne