[Info-vax] And another one bites the dust....

[Scott Dorsey]

Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>In article <j7dsr3Fqp7nU1 at mid.individual.net>,
>Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>On 2/19/22 21:07, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> I don't know any academics who think that COBOL is dead.  But
>>> I also don't know any academics who think about COBOL much at
>>> all.
>>
>>Then you must not know many currently teaching at American
>>Universities.
>
>I assure you I do.  Please forgive me for saying so, but I am
>getting the impression It seems to me that most of what you're
>saying here is based on personal experience in a single location
>several decades ago.

Academics shouldn't be teaching programming languages, they should be
teaching programming concepts.  If you know C or Pascal, learning 
how to write the procedure division code in COBOL should be a matter
of a couple hour's study.  Once you know the concepts, learning the
syntax is easy.  (Frustrating, perhaps, because the COBOL syntax is
so horrible, but easy.)

So, I don't think there is any need to teach the programming part of
COBOL in school.

What's interesting about COBOL is that there is a big data description
language attached to it, and the data description language is different
than anything else students will have seen.  So I think it's important
to at least talk about COBOL (and maybe RPG) because some of the basic
paradigms behind it are different than that of a canonical programming
language.  

But I don't think this should take more than a day or two in a programming
language survey class, because once students understand the basic concepts
they can figure it out on their own if they need it.

Understanding the basic concepts, though, is important to figure out how
some modern systems got to be the way they are today.

It doesn't matter whether a thing is dead or not, it matters whether a
thing can be used to teach useful concepts.  Real CS programs are about
teaching concepts, not methods.  It's expected that students can learn
methods as needed.
--scott


-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."