[Info-vax] Coding with/without RDBMS

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 10/18/21 10:07 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.

And why is that? Is it because the newer languages are better
for the tasks COBOL was designed for or is is it because academia
stopped teaching it and chose to attack it vehemently.

> 
> 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.

And totally unnecessary.  Modernization doesn't have to mean
using the language du jour.

> 
>> 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.

Nope, it's accurate.

> 
> 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.
> 

One of the places I worked at made us all take Agile clases.
I still have my book from the course and I break it out when
I need a good laugh.  It talks about what is now called
"waterfall" (we didn't call it that when we were doing it)
as something totally foreign to what was actually done.
And then sets itself up as the answer for a problem that
exists only in the minds of Agile supporters.

bill