[Info-vax] Coding with/without RDBMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 10/19/2021 12:34 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 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.

Availability of people with skills is a potential explanation.
But it empirical evidence does not support it - the very most
used languages are taught, but among the second tier languages
many are not taught widely including Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin,
Scala, Groovy, Ruby, VB etc..

The main driver has to be that the newer languages and the
supported frameworks/libraries make developers more productive.
They can focus on the business logic and let the language and
frameworks/libraries handle some of the trivial stuff. Same
thing that happened when people switch from assembler to
Fortran and Cobol a long time ago.

Possible augmented by the fact that a lot of the stuff that
is used today does not provide easy access to Cobol. Making
it more cumbersome to integrate.

>> 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.

True. And MicroFocus is making most of their money from
companies wanting to modernize without migrating off Cobol.

But if a company has to do a really big technological upgrade,
then a big part of them decide to migrate off Cobol. It is the right
time.

But a lot also decide to postpone.

Arne