[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 01/24/2018 09:47 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/24/2018 2:51 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 01/24/2018 02:20 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 1/24/2018 10:45 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>> But for much of the real work that drives business (like processing
>>>> credit card transactions or computing actuary tables languages like
>>>> COBOL and Fortran are still really the best choice.
>>>
>>> I am highly skeptical about that.
>>>
>>> Credit card transaction processing is traditionally done in Cobol, but
>>> I can not see any particular characteristics in Cobol that many newer
>>> languages does not have. I suspect that the main reason for Cobol's
>>> dominance in this market is that Cobol was the best language when the
>>> code was original written and that rewriting is considered too
>>> risky/expensive/interrupting.
>>>
>>> Fortran has never been widely used for business processing.
>>
>> Never said it was.  But things like Actuary Tables are  not what most
>> people think of when they think business.  But is certainly is to an
>> Insurance Company.  How about The Census Bureau? How would you class
>> them?  They still use Fortran and they still write new programs in it.
> 
> I doubt that Fortran is an optimal choice for what Census Bureau does.
> I would expect Cobol or a bunch of newer languages to be better for
> that.
> 

Doubt it all you want.  It (and COBOL to a lesser extent) is the
language they are usually looking for programmers for.

> 
>>>>                                                       The only thing
>>>> driving the move away from them is academia's decision to drive the bus
>>>> off a cliff rather than preparing students for entry into the IT world
>>>> (their actual job!!) by not only not teaching the requisite languages
>>>> but trying to sway students into believing the languages are dead and
>>>> totally unused.
>>>
>>> Or maybe programming languages has also improved like most other
>>> areas in IT.
>>
>> As have COBOL and Fortran.
> 
> In fact both Cobol and Fortran standards has evolved a lot.

Yes, they have. They have also been saddled with accretions the
user base have soundly rejected.

> 
> But neither implementations nor users has taken on the new
> standards.

Because they brought nothing to the table that was actually needed.

> 
> Fortran is probably doing slightly better than Cobol in this
> regard.

Of that I can not say from personal experience.

> 
> 
>>                         To continue to meet the needs of a specific
>> domain.  So why then would you use a generic language? 
> 
>>                                                                    If
>> you have a language available that was specifically designed for your
>> task why would you choose to use one that wasn't specifically designed
>> for any task?
> 
> I can follow that argument for Fortran. It has some characteristics
> (multi dimensional array handling, the way one can access part of array,
> complex number support, mathematical functions support etc.) that makes
> it still unique for a certain types of application - not a huge market,
> but it exists.
> 
> I find it much harder to see similar argument for Cobol. Lots of
> newer languages have targeted its area. And I do not see any
> unique characteristics (well - no relevant unique characteristics -
> Cobol certainly have some unique language characteristics) that
> can make it an obvious choice.

Well, the COBOL community doesn't seem to agree with you.  I am
personally familiar with at least four major (read very large)
COBOL based Information Systems.  There is no desire in any of
them to move away from COBOL.  And one could be done fairly easily
and with some advantage.

bill