[Info-vax] Coding with/without RDBMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 10/18/2021 1:28 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2021-10-18, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> That's funny...  The academic world did that decades ago.  That's
>> why we keep hearing that COBOL is dead  and OOP and Agile are the
>> best thing since sliced bread.
> 
> There's still a place for COBOL. Sometimes the practical language
> instead of the fashionable language is required.

If companies started with no code at all, then I suspect that
very few would pick Cobol today.

But the reality is that a lot of companies got a lot of Cobol
code. And moving away from Cobol may be a huge and risky task.

> OOP allows you to very nicely implement abstraction layers provided
> you don't go overboard and have 10 layers of abstraction to write
> out a single character (for example). :-)
> 
> Agile OTOH seems way too often to be used as an excuse to not to do
> the hard and real work of designing and laying out the overall
> architecture before implementing the design.

I think that is mostly a myth that thrives among non-agile
developers.

Agile does not mean no architecture. Agile means the
right amount of architecture depending on project
size, criticality and volatility.

There has been written a ton about it the last decade.
Leading authors include Scott Ambler and Martin Fowler.
Some agile methodologies even use TOGAF.

Arne