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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/5/2023 1:23 PM, bill wrote:
> On 11/5/2023 12:47 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> 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 piles of jobs for them.

If you look at the job market then the re are not many jobs.

And the majority of those jobs that are there happen to be in India.

Observable fact.

>                                    All the current crop are retiring.

Supply is decreasing.

So no excess demand mean that demand is also decreasing.

> I just mentioned above a multi million dollar a year project that had
> to be abandoned for lack of programmers?  And why was that?  They even
> tried a strong internship program to bring in second and third year
> undergrads they would teach COBOL.  I put up the flyers all over the
> CS Department where I worked.  I talked with students about it,  And
> all this time one of the Professors went around telling the students
> not to do it.  And refusing to sign off on their internship program
> to fulfill the internship requirement for the degree.  I expect it was
> treated the same at other CS Departments.  Any student who had gone into
> this program was guaranteed a very high paying job upon graduation.

Consider how a market economy works.

If demand exceed supply then price goes up until demand and
supply are equal.

For a skill that take time to learn then that can cause
a crazy peak for a few years until supply catches up.

If a company really need Cobol skills they raise pay until they get
the Cobol developers they need.

If they don't really need Cobol skills then they pick
another language.

You can see what is happening.

>> 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.
> 
> If it is already written in COBOL why would you need to re-write
> it in COBOL?

Things evolve.

Always a need for new features and a need to reduce cost.

The traditional banks are a bit pressed by the constraints
of their old systems not being present in the systems from the
new fintech companies.

>> 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.
> 
> Numerous surveys have shown that while new front ends in other
> languages are being done so is a lot of new COBOL.

Sure about that?

The last such number I have seen saying so is from the late 90's.

>> All the less critical but developer time consuming
>> code in UI and reporting are long gone.
> 
> UI's, yes.  But then COBOL was never much n UI's anyway.  That's
> why web programming stuff was added to CICS ages ago.  IBM certainly
> knew that the web would replace all those 3270's.  And, I have done
> web front ends for COBOL.  Time changes that doesn't mean the language
> become useless.  Not much done with ISAM nowadays. BUt DB's fit right
> in.

Cobol is not cost effective for web development.

>> 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.
> 
> By "we have a problem" I assume you are referencing the infamous New
> Jersey State Employment Agency case.

No. The "Cobol programmers are getting old and retiring so we will
have a problem" message that come out occasionally.

>                                    Too bad people stopped talking
> about it before it turned out to not be a COBOL problem at all but a
> web front end problem.

That is not what happened.

What happened was that people submitted their request for
unemployment benefits successfully, it took for ever to process
them, people checked status on their requests via web and the
web frontend got overwhelmed by impatient users wanting to
check why they did not receive any money. The symptoms
appeared at the frontend, but was caused by the backend.

Arne