[Info-vax] OpenVMS async I/O, fast vs. slow

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/5/2023 10:58 AM, bill wrote:
> In 1980 I was a COBOL Programmer/Systems Analyst on IBM and Univac
> Mainframes.  Trade journals were already saying "COBOL is dead".
> And yet, it went on.  Two of the largest ISes in the country (probably
> the world) were COBOL. Still are today and there is no plan or sign that
> they will ever be replaced with another language.  There was a third.
> Contractor opted to not renew and the program died.  Not because of any
> flaws in COBOL but because academia refuses to teach it even as an
> elective.  System belonged to the contractor so stayed with them.  New
> system written from scratch in god only knows what language, Some
> language du jour.  The new system is slow, cumbersome, error prone and
> lacks many of the features that the old system had.
> 
> We have so many "colleges" teaching trade school courses (like diesel
> mechanics, HVAC welding and even motorcycle mechanics)I really wish
> trade schools would step up to the plate ad start teaching IT and in
> particular thing like COBOL, Fortran and PL/I.  They are not going away.

There is not much point, because there will not be jobs
for them.

There are a lot of Cobol and PL/I code in production doing
usually highly business critical stuff.

But if cost and risk are too high to rewrite to C++
or Java or C# or whatever, then the risk of
rewriting it in Cobol is also too high.

So instead the new functionality is put in
secondary systems using newer technology and
only changes that has to be done in the core
are done there.

All the less critical but developer time consuming
code in UI and reporting are long gone.

As a result the demand is small.

It is not zero but despite the frequent "we have
a problem" announcements, then it seems like they can
keep and hire+train the people they need for
maintenance.

Arne