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3rd State of the Perl Onion
Geoff Eldridge writes "
Larry Wall has made available a
copy
of his 3rd State of the Perl Onion which he recently delivered.
You will need a basic grounding in molecular chemistry to understand
this year's onion." Larry is (as always) pretty dang wierd. But it is nice to know that the end of cobol is iminent.
The great thing about Perl is that it seems carefully crafted to allow you to do a specific set of tasks-- text proccessing & CGI scripts mostly-- and to do those tasks with a minimum of effort by the coders. After attempting to do this sort of thing in c, Perl was a giant relief. Operations that can take a dozen lines of c can be done with a single Perl command. And the scalar datatypes, string interpolation, built in regular expressions, and lots of syntactic sugar saves the hassles normally asociate with a simple task like reading a line of text, parsing it, and writing it out to a file. For what it does, Perl is awesome!
Well exactly! I'm not proud to say this, but I've spent the better part of my career (13+ years) writing COBOL. Its not the best language in the world for every application, but I shudder at the idea of converting and supporting the 2 million+ lines of code we have in our back-end mainframe legacy system to C or any other language for that matter.
Inertia. Plain and simple. Our company has a client-server, C++, OO Open System platform billing system which is intended to replace our legacy systems. Guess what? Can't handle the millions of accounts that out mainframe systems can, and it can't keep up with the new features that are being deployed in the existing systems. Sure, in time they'll catch up in scalability and feature set, but it won't be in the next 12 months, I bet.
True, all the new systems are being developed without COBOL. This is for obvious reasons. This doesn't mean that COBOL is going away at the end of next year when the Y2K repair work is finished. It just means that there won't be many *new* projects using COBOL. There will still be like 80% of the existing business DP systems running legacy code that won't be replaced for years to come.
In a perfect world, I would love to be rid of COBOL. I just ain't necessarily so!
It would be really nice if you thought about mirroring the document before posting the story. It's unfair to link a low-bandwidth site without a previous warning ...
--sledge
Oh my god! You slashdotted Larry! ...
You bastards!
As Aaaaaaanold said in the movie Conan: The Destroyer... "Lot on your knife!"
COBOL isn't going anywhere, especially with the advent of e-commerce. Did you know that there was more NEW lines of COBOL written than any other language except C++ and the difference between those two was something like 2%? Did you know that the COBOL language has been continually updated and modernized such that it is as modern a language as nearly any other? Did you know COBOL can do OOP?
Ok, it's been years since I've done any COBOL coding and I do most of my current stuff with perl but I still have to defend a very good language from the uninformed assaults against it. COBOL really gets a bad rap.
---
"Who pill da cubby custar?"
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
I've grabbed the text of the article and placed it here: http://www.toehold.com/mirror/onion3 /talk.html I'm still working on getting the images and .au files from this poor slashdotted site. -- Kyle Hasselbacher <kyle-slash@toehold.com>