[Info-vax] Any stronger versions of the LMF planned ?, was: Re: LMF Licence Generator Code

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-08-18, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <lawrencedo99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At least you get points for trying. Notice your code is already about an order of magnitude larger than mine, and liable to increase even more. Consider how you would add another search field: you have to add it in 3 places in the Python version, and is it actually 6 places in the COBOL one?!?
>
> Remember Fred Brooks? dictum about ?10 lines of code per day?? No wonder COBOL programmers have such low productivity ...

Lawrence, there are two things you might be missing that makes COBOL
much more suitable than your scripting languages in mission critical
production use.

1) Can you guarantee that you will be able to get your code running
on the compilers, operating systems and the versions of the scripting
languages available 10 or 20 years from now ?

Part of that is using languages that have international standards
for them so compilers are created against those standards. When
new versions of the standards are available, you can still compile
your code against the older versions of those standards if on the
rare occasion there have been incompatible changes.

COBOL can be considered to meet these tests. Can your scripting
languages ?

2) Can your scripting languages handle the hideously large transaction
rates that some COBOL code is currently required to work with ?

For the record, I use scripting languages for all kinds of things,
including the scripting languages you clearly like. However, using them
to replace COBOL code is not one of the things I would consider using
them for.

Managers don't give a damn about writing more compact code unless
it gives major new functionality, which your alternative code does not.

They do care however about making sure that code will still work in
the environments of tomorrow and that the code will run reliably in
high transaction rate mission critical environments today.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.