[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/26/2023 8:13 PM, bill wrote:
> On 2/26/2023 6:47 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 2/26/2023 4:30 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, LibreOffice etc. are used
>>> by hundreds of thousands or millions of companies
>>> world wide. But how many of them could and would
>>> take on fixing bugs in the source. I suspect that
>>> would be counted in a few thousands.
>>
>> My suspicions are no better than yours, but, I'd be surprised if there 
>> was even 100.  System type software is different from application 
>> software.
> 
> Times have changed.  In this factor as well as the rest.
> 
> My first full-time job as a programmer was doing applications
> programming on a Univac 1100 mainframe.  I was pretty good at
> and I worked hard.  The reward was a transfer from SAPB (Systems
> Analysis and Programming Branch) to SSSB (Systems Software Support
> Branch).
> 
> At one time IT departments had systems people as well as applications
> people.  I miss those days.

The code bases were smaller in those days.

Today you may have:
- OS 50 MLOC
- language compiler and runtime library 10 MLOC
- database 10 MLOC
- web server, cache server and MQ server 10 MLOC
- bunch of open source libraries 40 MLOC
giving a total of 120 MLOC.

Nobody want to touch such huge code base.

And nobody want to reimplement such huge code
bases (even if the company only need 1/10th of
the functionality resulting in only needing
1/10th of the code then it is prohibitive
expensive for anybody outside of top-100).

Arne