[Info-vax] First ship poll: When will the first native x86-64 compilers ship ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/17/2022 4:25 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 4/17/22 12:52, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 4/17/2022 9:05 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> On 4/16/22 20:26, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>> On 4/16/2022 6:54 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>>> As for the non-IBM side.  I have done a number of proof of
>>>>> concept COBOL <-> WEB systems back in my academia days.
>>>>> It's actually easier than PHP. Cleaner than PHP.  Easier to
>>>>> understand than PHP.  And definitely more secure than PHP.
>>>>
>>>> CGI scripts or?
>>>
>>> I guess some would call it that, but what I did weren't "scripts",
>>> they were real programs.
>>
>> CGI script just specify the mechanism used between the web server
>> and the application code.
>>
>> It can be DCL/Perl/whatever or C/Cobol/Fotran/whatever.
>>
>> It has been obsolete for serious usage in 2 decades.
> 
> Yeah,, I keep hearing how COBOL and Fortran etc. are all dead.
> funny how that never seems to come about.  Oh yeah, and BYTE
> Magazine announced the death of Unix at least 30 years ago.
> One can only hope that the current move to take IT education
> out of the hands of academia may eventually bring the industry
> back to its senses.

You are mixing up a lot of stuff.

By obsolete I mean technologies where better technologies
has been invented. That means that someone having totally freedom
to pick the technology will never pick the obsolete one.
Obsolete stuff may still be supported. And new code
may still be created based on the obsolete technology, if the new
code has to fit in with a lot of old code based on
that technology. There will be a desire to change from the
obsolete technology to something newer, but the risk of
a big migration project get many migrations postponed
to some undefined future.

Dead on the other hand is more severe. The technology does
not have a future. Either support has been dropped or
a deadline for end of support has been set - and no new
versions. That is a scenario that forces IT departments
to start migration projects. They may not like the risk
and they may not like the timing, but the risk of not
migrating is too big.

Fortran is neither dead nor obsolete. Fortran 66 and 77 is
obsolete, but newer Fortran versions are not. Fortran has
become very much niche, but if even for a totally new from
scratch project, then there are cases (scientific number
crunching) where Fortran is still an obvious choice.
Python, R and Julia have taken over the high level
logic, but down to the matrices and vectors then
Fortran is still a player.

Cobol is not dead. IBM, VSI, Microfocus etc. still support
it and develop new versions. Lots of Cobol code exists
and there is no indications that everybody will have
migrated off within the next few decades. But I will consider
Cobol obsolete. If starting from scratch then Cobol will
not be chosen - business calculations, RDBMS access,
key value store access etc. can be done better in other
languages. Languages for business applications is
a very overcrowded market today.

CGI scripts are not dead either. There are still CGI scripts
being used (even though not that many - applications get rewritten
a lot faster in the web world than in the world where Cobol
reside). Most web servers still support them (even though
it has become common to not have them enabled by default).
But obsolete - not a choice for new applications. There
are so many alternatives (PHP, Python, node.js, Java, .NET etc. all
have lots of different alternatives). And CGI scripts has
some fundamental problems. Process creation make them slow on *nix
and very slow on non-*nix. The execution model makes it impossible
to use database connection pools so database access is slow.
The execution model makes simple in memory application and
session objects impossible.

Arne