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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 12/13/21 1:26 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.

Well, I was there and my view is somewhat different than yours.

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

There was no CS in the 60's and only later in the 70's  It was
just a sideline for math departments.  In any event, most CS
departments had two tracks CS and CIS.  CS played with Unix
and C and CIS was COBOL, PL/1 (in IBM dominated areas like
Marist College) and even some RPG and 360 BAL.

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

We kept a COBOL course on the books well into the 90's but it
was never offered.  COBOL was used in a mandatory (for both CS
and CIS programs) course, Until the early 2000's.  It was done
using DEC COBOL until the day they made me remove the last VMS
machines from my data center.  It was not unsuitability that
resulted in these changes it was politics.  Both VMS and COBOL
were seen as "legacy". Something the students shouldn't even
be introduced to.  VMS was easier to get rid of because all
they had to do was tell me to get rid of the hardware.  COBOL
took a little longer (and a lot more work) because the course
using it had to be redone.

> 
> (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.

Really?  Then where do you assign the blame?

> 
> 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.

It started there and once they stopped teaching non-OOP pardigms
what did the people coming out to places like AT&T, Apple, Xerox,
etc. know other than OOP?

> 
> 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.

Sadly, I think OOP is going to be here a long time.  I am just
glad the people working where it is not a good fit have resisted
it.  I still do COBOL.  Mostly just for fun, but it is still
interesting.  You should go over to Rosetta Code and see all the
things COBOL does that aren't even in its wheelhouse.

bill