[Info-vax] COBOL Is Obsolete (was Re: Any stronger versions of the LMF planned ?)

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 9/22/21 1:09 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 9/22/2021 11:50 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 9/22/2021 8:49 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>  And people live with the
>>> overhead (I don't think that the overhead of a call API is
>>> significant, but with ORM a lot happens under the hood).
>>
>> As with so much today, the work is not decreased, it is just hidden.
> 
> The business application developer need to write much less code,
> but a lot of things may happen inside the frameworks used.
> 

That was tried ages ago, too.  There was SCORE, a COBOL generator from
the 80's.  It generated unmaintainable COBOL so any modifications had
to be done to the SCORE source code.  That was great until you ran into
something that you could not define using SCORE.

The same was true with COBOL generator sold by Tandy in their computer
stores.  It generated Ryan-MCFarland COBOL for the compiler they sold.
If you think COBOL written by real programmers is verbose you should
have seen the output from this.  Too big to edit in any editor on the
machines it ran on so, same problem.  Changes had to be made from the
original source and sometimes you needed to do things it was not able to do.

Nothing beats a real programer working with a real language.

bill