[Info-vax] COBOL Is Obsolete (was Re: Any stronger versions of the LMF planned ?)

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/22/2021 1:27 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 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.

That which I would label as "compiling 4GL to 3GL" has a somewhat
mixed history of success and was also mostly dropped just to
pop up again recently as "low code platforms".

But it does not really relate much to what I was describing. I was
talking about libraries that handle a lot of the "how" and let
the developer focus more on the "what". I will claim that the concept
of powerful libraries has proven itself to be a good thing
over the last half century.

Arne