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COBOL Turning 50, Still Important
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from a story about COBOL's influence as it approaches 50 years in existence:
"According to David Stephenson, the UK manager for the software provider Micro Focus, 'some 70% to 80% of UK plc business transactions are still based on COBOL.' ... Mike Gilpin, from the market research company Forrester, says that the company's most recent related survey found that 32% of enterprises say they still use COBOL for development or maintenance. ... A lot of this maintenance and development takes place on IBM products. The company's software group director of product delivery and strategy, Charles Chu, says that he doesn't think 'legacy' is pejorative. 'Business constantly evolves,' he adds, 'but there are 250bn lines of COBOL code working well worldwide. Why would companies replace systems that are working well?'"
Java is going to be inherently slower on the same hardware due to the interpeting of the code that it must do. Obviously good coding helps too but there is going to be some inherent latency because of the fact the Java code isn't compiled to machine code.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Its like your grandfather. Everyone knows he's too old and can't keep up with the kids anymore, but you don't want to say it to his face right? We're just waiting for the last COBOL programmer to die off and then then everyone will breath a remorseful sigh of relief and start coding in Java again.
Could you imagine if the FSF guys created a programming language. Like GNUbol--the first programming language that protects your Freedom(tm). It could have freedom protecting measures like only being able to compile on Certified Free Software. The official text editor of GNUbol, EMACS, would offer Freedom Enhancements like the ability to hit META L + DEL + SHIFT + @ and get a view of the assembly code generated for every statement. You could edit the assembly code or even change the microcode on the GPL'd GNUPU (GNU processing unit, the only GNU/CPU supported (though we prefer to call every CPU GNU/CPU because they wouldn't have anything to run without award winning GNU tools like cat, y, and pushd)). Since the entire stack, from GNUPU to the text editor is licensed under the GPL, you could rest easy knowing all software you create will automatically be licensed under the GPL!
I kid, I kid. Clearly you couldn't edit the GNUPU , at least in version 0.03. Maybe in 0.1, but that is many years from now.
But yes, you are right. If there isn't a politicized language, there should be.
Does that mean my Java skill set is likely to keep me employed for the next 30 to 40 years?
havn't you reskilled in C# yet? Java is not the same as COBOL, whereas those old COBOL apps will still be running 50 years (IBM'll see to it they do, so no-one needs to re-engineer their system), you are now on the downward slope to obsolescence in favour of this century's 'must-have' language fashion accessory.
I think its pants too, but that's what the software vendors have foisted upon us.