[Info-vax] Licenses on VAX/VMS 4.0/4.1 source code listing scans

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/12/2021 6:32 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> Exactly.  Those of us who have been around since before then
> watched it happen.  OOP came out.  Academia pushed it as the
> ultimate paradigm. Languages that had been around successfully
> doing what they did for decades grafted OOP into their languages
> and forced it down people's throats.  Object COBOL came out.
> COBOL practitioners of the art laughed and announced that the
> emperor really had no clothes on at all and refused to re-write
> all their applications in the new paradigm.  Academia's reaction
> was to take a page out of the Amish rule book.  They shunned COBOL.
> They stopped teaching it even in CIS courses where it was still
> the most practical language to get the job done.  They attacked
> it claiming weaknesses that didn't exist.  They told students
> that even learning COBOL would ruin them as programmers (shades
> of Dijkstra!!)

Nice story, but it has nothing to do with reality.

Computer Science never liked Cobol - they were on the Algol
and Pascal wagon back in the 60's and 70's.

Lesser academic educations teaching programming typical
dropped Cobol in the 90's due to lack of demand.

(and non-IT areas like Physics, Medicine and Economics were
Fortran back then)

Cobol first got OO features in 2002.

It is pretty obvious from the timeline that lack of interest
in OO Cobol was not the reason for Cobol's missing presence
in education.

Computer science did push OOP back in the 80's and 90's. But
the industry was very much involved as well (Apple: object-pascal
and objective-c; Borland: later Turbo Pascal, Delphi;
Microsoft: C++; SUN: C++, Java). And even some of the
academic research was funded by the industry (AT&T, Xerox etc.), so
OO is not an academic thing.

And it has thrived because of the value it provides - not because
universities pushed it. The last 10-20 years Computer Science
has pushed FP not OOP. But true FP has never really caught on
in the industry. Most OOP languages got a few FP features and
they are used for convenience, but not enough to be true FP.

Arne