COBOL is not significantly easier to learn than most languages. Take a look at the hello world collection and tell me COBOL is easier to write hello world than any other.
Python is a one liner. As are many other languages. Even Java with its "horribly difficult to understand" OOP syntax (?!?!?) is less lines than COBOL.
I'm not saying COBOL is hard to understand or learn, but neither is it easier. Other languages have the same useful capabilities as COBOL, with powerful standard libraries making modern programming easier.
I really don't think it will surprise anyone. If some one knows technology, they understand it. If someone doesn't know technology then nothing about it is surprising to them because they really think their computers are magic boxes. And if you tell them part of the magic box has a problem they won't assume to know what parts of the reaming magic box will have a problem, other than the tangible parts they see ( I think the DNS problem has screwed up my mouse/printer). I don't think there is a group of people thought that a DNS exploit would only affect browsing websites, and were surprised to learn that's not the whole truth.
I think the only group of affected people were technical people who had a segfault in their brains when they first thought about it. So they are now surprised not at how DNS works, but at the memory faults in their head.
Exactly. But still, anyone using javascript for element alignment needs some smacking upside a head or two. Plus there is javascript from over ten different sources on that page. That's sad and scary. There should be a firefox extension that rates the trust worthiness of a site based upon things like the number of javascript sources, and the types of functions used. Feel free to tell me if such an extension exists and suggest other reasons for the smacking of heads.
Yeah, I'm aware of the history of computing. That's sort of the point. Its hard to tell with my Grandfather if he's forgotten about some things that he may have heard of ( like UNIX), or he just never knew about them be cause he didn't use them. The Database issue has been well discussed in other comment sub threads. I'm not sure if he only dealt with program specific formatted data files ( not databases) or if he actually did work with ISAM or similar files ( which smell like databases, I would admit).
I checked out the link for the free COBOL editor for windows in your sig. One of the screen shots has the file handling I've seen before in it. That is what I thought my grandfather was referring to as a datafile, rather than a ISAM file.
Ok, I understand. I'm not sure if making bullying a child should be a crime in normal cases, simply because I can't think of an appropriate punishment. If someone is deranged enough to make fun of a kid, is there a penalty worse enough to discourage them from doing it, without being cruel and unusual?
Well, its true. I think there is a miscommunication somewhere between my grandfather and me. When I think of databases, I think of RDBMS with SQL and ACID. He knows what a datafile is, maybe he means ISAM when he talks about datafiles. From my limited experience with FORTRAN and very basic COBOL, I assumed it was simply a file data stored in a format completely controlled by the program. Rather than a industry standard file format, complete with indexes. I'll ask him the next time I see him if he's familiar with ISAM's. You also have to to take his age, mental condition and years away from programing into account as well ( which was a large part of the point I was trying to make).
I'm guessing he never understood the term. As another poster pointed out COBOL had support for ISAM files. I'm sure he didn't use it in a relational context.
No, that would be stupid. You didn't understand my post. Not that its your fault. A post doesn't contain all of the information necessary to completely unambiguously understand it, nor should it in most cases. So people read it with their own experience and background and interpret it differently.
I do think that if the language was closer to other languages that were actively being taught and used in industry, any program specific implementation problem would be less of an issue.
I'm not really sure what I meant by that comment. I think I may have meant the opposite of what I said( if they kill themselves the adult should be charged with manslaughter or worse, if they had prior knowledge of the child's severe mental illness. ). I agree with you.
I think you missed the second part of my analogy, where some one deliberately puts peanuts into someones food with the intention of causing harm. But your flesh wound is close too. If you are throwing knives in a circus and accidentally hit a hemophiliac, you probably shouldn't be prosecuted. Also hemophiliacs probably shouldn't be the balloon holders or anywhere near a knife thrower.
I'm not sure exactly sure if you agree with me or not, or even if you understood me. So I'm writing this to sort of restate my position.
That mental illness statistic includes things like non chronic depression which accounts for most cases [citation missing, relying on faulty memory of researching this at one point, use under advisement]. I think the child is obviously mentally ill (schizophrenia, bipolar, manic depression, hurts themselves, animals, or others or expresses desire to, mental retardation,ect ) there should be a greater penalty for mentally abusing them, including in certain cases reckless homicide. The publicity of a particular case, post crime, should obviously not have an effect on the prosecution of the crime. I am not advocating a special interpretation of existing law, if necessary. Rather, I'm proposing the way I think the laws that we should have should work. IANAL, so I'm not sure what the current applicable laws are, nor how they should be applied.
Think of it in terms of an severe peanut allergy. Peanuts don't hurt me or many other people. If I open a bag of peanuts, not knowing the person sitting next to me on a train will die, I should not be prosecuted of a crime. If, I know someone is allergic to peanuts, and sneak peanuts into their food, I should be prosecuted of a crime. So If the adult knew the child was mentally ill and chose to provoke her, I think there should be consequences, but any such law should require preexisting knowledge of mental illness.
First of all, I have immense respect for anyone named vacuum_tuber and am embarrassed I didn't grab the name when I had the chance.
Anyone who can't get their mind around COBOL is a moron. Anyone who simply doesn't want to is a fool.
I agree with the first part whole heatedly, but the second half is absurd. Why is it foolish to not want to learn a particular programming language? There are different problems that require different tools. If I never anticipate using the COBOL tool, I'm not sure it make sense learning how to use it properly.
I think that may be symptomatic of the growth of the industry, rather than any age discrimination going on. There are simply more developers than there were 20, 30 years ago. Both my uncles are actively engaged 50 year old developers. I've worked with others as well.
Heck, yeah! PL/1. I found a book for it in College and managed to find a free ( as in I didn't pay for it) compiler. Wrote a couple programs in it for my optics class.
Well, I apologize if anyone was insulted by any insinuation that COBOL programmers == my Grandfather and especially Mr/Ms/Mrs Coward who seems to be deeply offended. That was not my intention, but I can see how a reasonable person may also have come to that conclusion. I wish Mr/Ms/Mrs Coward the best of luck in his or her future endeavors in the field of their choosing.
Hmm.. You have a good point about ISAM. I can't find enough info on the web to understand how he doesn't know the term. He does know about Datafiles. Maybe he's confused, its been 26 years since he's done anything with it.
I don't think its a coincidence that most languages in use today use similar conventions to FORTRAN, rather than COBOL. ie
ADD 1 TO MYNUMBER GIVING NEWNUMBER
versus
INEWNUMBER = INUMBER +1
Everyone has always said that the designers wanted COBOL to be readable so non technical personnel could audit source code. I don't think FORTRAN was that much harder to read ( if you understood the same math a 3rd grader is capable of). I think a syntax (mathematical symbols that are almost universally understood rather than full English words) closer to fortran's would have been a better choice.
1)I asked how old were the guys were he thought weren't being given a fair shot. My grandfather wrote Payroll systems for large firms like Ben Franklin, and Montgommary(sp?) Ward. He wasn't stupid, he was a pioneer in the very field we are talking about: COBOL based payroll systems for large organizations.
2)I did not mean to imply that smart people didn't work on COBOL, or that all of them ended up like my grandfather. I just wanted a further explanation of who he thought were being discriminated against. If you asked my grandfather, he would say its because of his age, rather than the lack of his qualifications. There are a fair number of COBOL programmers of his era that are his age. I'm not sure there is a very large population of COBOL programmers that are not able to find work, solely because of their age.
3)Are you implying that I read the dummies books for Java and Databases? Ouch. that wasn't nice. Not sure what that has to do with the price of wheat in Thailand, but thanks for sharing your thoughts. Ironically, you remind me a lot of my Grandfather. When he starts losing an argument he switches to personal attacks on his opponents education and qualifications. Learn form his mistakes: don't become a bitter old man who hurts those who love him the most.
Define old. My Step Grandfather was a COBOL programmer. He's 86 now. You really shouldn't let him near anything electronic. He retired in the early eighties and hasn't kept up with any developments in the field. He doesn't know what a database is. Or Unix. He knows the IBM 360 pretty well though. So if they develop on it using IBM cards, he might be able to help.
If you ask me, this is all payback for the original design of COBOL. If they had just extended FORTRAN and required any one interested in looking at code to have a 3rd graders grasp of math, California wouldn't be in this position and existing COBOL programmers wouldn't have to lie about their development language when talking to other developers.
Actually, this story is about how California can't screw their state workers to make a political point, right? I guess COBOL wins after all, but they really should have made the syntax a little more like befudge.
I, personally, think you may not have read the article. I, personally, also think the headline writer should be fired, or possibly promoted as he has generated large about of buzz from a bad headline, but few people seem to have actually read it.
I, personally, think that if I don't ever, personally, think something, I,personally, will not say that I thought it.
HotBot was great until Google started to return relevant results. The Hotbot and the others started a viscous death spiral with less users they needed more ads to make up the revenue. More ads resulted in less users. I'll admit I was one o the last to finally admit Google's superiority. HotBot was so much better for a while. I never understood the initial migration to google. Maybe the interface? The cool name?
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COBOL is not significantly easier to learn than most languages. Take a look at the hello world collection and tell me COBOL is easier to write hello world than any other.
Python is a one liner. As are many other languages. Even Java with its "horribly difficult to understand" OOP syntax (?!?!?) is less lines than COBOL.
I'm not saying COBOL is hard to understand or learn, but neither is it easier. Other languages have the same useful capabilities as COBOL, with powerful standard libraries making modern programming easier.
I really don't think it will surprise anyone. If some one knows technology, they understand it. If someone doesn't know technology then nothing about it is surprising to them because they really think their computers are magic boxes. And if you tell them part of the magic box has a problem they won't assume to know what parts of the reaming magic box will have a problem, other than the tangible parts they see ( I think the DNS problem has screwed up my mouse/printer). I don't think there is a group of people thought that a DNS exploit would only affect browsing websites, and were surprised to learn that's not the whole truth.
I think the only group of affected people were technical people who had a segfault in their brains when they first thought about it. So they are now surprised not at how DNS works, but at the memory faults in their head.
Exactly. But still, anyone using javascript for element alignment needs some smacking upside a head or two. Plus there is javascript from over ten different sources on that page. That's sad and scary. There should be a firefox extension that rates the trust worthiness of a site based upon things like the number of javascript sources, and the types of functions used. Feel free to tell me if such an extension exists and suggest other reasons for the smacking of heads.
Yeah, I'm aware of the history of computing. That's sort of the point. Its hard to tell with my Grandfather if he's forgotten about some things that he may have heard of ( like UNIX), or he just never knew about them be cause he didn't use them. The Database issue has been well discussed in other comment sub threads. I'm not sure if he only dealt with program specific formatted data files ( not databases) or if he actually did work with ISAM or similar files ( which smell like databases, I would admit).
I'll ask the next time I talk with him.
I checked out the link for the free COBOL editor for windows in your sig. One of the screen shots has the file handling I've seen before in it. That is what I thought my grandfather was referring to as a datafile, rather than a ISAM file.
Ok, I understand. I'm not sure if making bullying a child should be a crime in normal cases, simply because I can't think of an appropriate punishment. If someone is deranged enough to make fun of a kid, is there a penalty worse enough to discourage them from doing it, without being cruel and unusual?
Well, its true. I think there is a miscommunication somewhere between my grandfather and me. When I think of databases, I think of RDBMS with SQL and ACID. He knows what a datafile is, maybe he means ISAM when he talks about datafiles. From my limited experience with FORTRAN and very basic COBOL, I assumed it was simply a file data stored in a format completely controlled by the program. Rather than a industry standard file format, complete with indexes. I'll ask him the next time I see him if he's familiar with ISAM's. You also have to to take his age, mental condition and years away from programing into account as well ( which was a large part of the point I was trying to make).
I'm guessing he never understood the term. As another poster pointed out COBOL had support for ISAM files. I'm sure he didn't use it in a relational context.
No, that would be stupid. You didn't understand my post. Not that its your fault. A post doesn't contain all of the information necessary to completely unambiguously understand it, nor should it in most cases. So people read it with their own experience and background and interpret it differently.
I do think that if the language was closer to other languages that were actively being taught and used in industry, any program specific implementation problem would be less of an issue.
I'm not really sure what I meant by that comment. I think I may have meant the opposite of what I said( if they kill themselves the adult should be charged with manslaughter or worse, if they had prior knowledge of the child's severe mental illness. ). I agree with you.
I think you missed the second part of my analogy, where some one deliberately puts peanuts into someones food with the intention of causing harm. But your flesh wound is close too. If you are throwing knives in a circus and accidentally hit a hemophiliac, you probably shouldn't be prosecuted. Also hemophiliacs probably shouldn't be the balloon holders or anywhere near a knife thrower.
I'm not sure exactly sure if you agree with me or not, or even if you understood me. So I'm writing this to sort of restate my position.
That mental illness statistic includes things like non chronic depression which accounts for most cases [citation missing, relying on faulty memory of researching this at one point, use under advisement]. I think the child is obviously mentally ill (schizophrenia, bipolar, manic depression, hurts themselves, animals, or others or expresses desire to, mental retardation,ect ) there should be a greater penalty for mentally abusing them, including in certain cases reckless homicide. The publicity of a particular case, post crime, should obviously not have an effect on the prosecution of the crime. I am not advocating a special interpretation of existing law, if necessary. Rather, I'm proposing the way I think the laws that we should have should work. IANAL, so I'm not sure what the current applicable laws are, nor how they should be applied.
Maybe not, but they shouldn't be prosecuted for manslaughter or worse, if the child does kill themselves.
Think of it in terms of an severe peanut allergy. Peanuts don't hurt me or many other people. If I open a bag of peanuts, not knowing the person sitting next to me on a train will die, I should not be prosecuted of a crime. If, I know someone is allergic to peanuts, and sneak peanuts into their food, I should be prosecuted of a crime. So If the adult knew the child was mentally ill and chose to provoke her, I think there should be consequences, but any such law should require preexisting knowledge of mental illness.
Am I missing something, or is it that simple?
I agree with the first part whole heatedly, but the second half is absurd. Why is it foolish to not want to learn a particular programming language? There are different problems that require different tools. If I never anticipate using the COBOL tool, I'm not sure it make sense learning how to use it properly.
I think that may be symptomatic of the growth of the industry, rather than any age discrimination going on. There are simply more developers than there were 20, 30 years ago. Both my uncles are actively engaged 50 year old developers. I've worked with others as well.
Heck, yeah! PL/1. I found a book for it in College and managed to find a free ( as in I didn't pay for it) compiler. Wrote a couple programs in it for my optics class.
Well, I apologize if anyone was insulted by any insinuation that COBOL programmers == my Grandfather and especially Mr/Ms/Mrs Coward who seems to be deeply offended. That was not my intention, but I can see how a reasonable person may also have come to that conclusion. I wish Mr/Ms/Mrs Coward the best of luck in his or her future endeavors in the field of their choosing.
Hmm.. You have a good point about ISAM. I can't find enough info on the web to understand how he doesn't know the term. He does know about Datafiles. Maybe he's confused, its been 26 years since he's done anything with it.
I don't think its a coincidence that most languages in use today use similar conventions to FORTRAN, rather than COBOL. ie
ADD 1 TO MYNUMBER GIVING NEWNUMBER
versus
INEWNUMBER = INUMBER +1
Everyone has always said that the designers wanted COBOL to be readable so non technical personnel could audit source code. I don't think FORTRAN was that much harder to read ( if you understood the same math a 3rd grader is capable of). I think a syntax (mathematical symbols that are almost universally understood rather than full English words) closer to fortran's would have been a better choice.
1)I asked how old were the guys were he thought weren't being given a fair shot. My grandfather wrote Payroll systems for large firms like Ben Franklin, and Montgommary(sp?) Ward. He wasn't stupid, he was a pioneer in the very field we are talking about: COBOL based payroll systems for large organizations.
2)I did not mean to imply that smart people didn't work on COBOL, or that all of them ended up like my grandfather. I just wanted a further explanation of who he thought were being discriminated against. If you asked my grandfather, he would say its because of his age, rather than the lack of his qualifications. There are a fair number of COBOL programmers of his era that are his age. I'm not sure there is a very large population of COBOL programmers that are not able to find work, solely because of their age.
3)Are you implying that I read the dummies books for Java and Databases? Ouch. that wasn't nice. Not sure what that has to do with the price of wheat in Thailand, but thanks for sharing your thoughts. Ironically, you remind me a lot of my Grandfather. When he starts losing an argument he switches to personal attacks on his opponents education and qualifications. Learn form his mistakes: don't become a bitter old man who hurts those who love him the most.
Define old. My Step Grandfather was a COBOL programmer. He's 86 now. You really shouldn't let him near anything electronic. He retired in the early eighties and hasn't kept up with any developments in the field. He doesn't know what a database is. Or Unix. He knows the IBM 360 pretty well though. So if they develop on it using IBM cards, he might be able to help.
If you ask me, this is all payback for the original design of COBOL. If they had just extended FORTRAN and required any one interested in looking at code to have a 3rd graders grasp of math, California wouldn't be in this position and existing COBOL programmers wouldn't have to lie about their development language when talking to other developers.
Actually, this story is about how California can't screw their state workers to make a political point, right? I guess COBOL wins after all, but they really should have made the syntax a little more like befudge.
I, personally, think you may not have read the article. I, personally, also think the headline writer should be fired, or possibly promoted as he has generated large about of buzz from a bad headline, but few people seem to have actually read it.
I, personally, think that if I don't ever, personally, think something, I,personally, will not say that I thought it.
I agree 100%. I will not be doing a machine's work. I will make the machine do my work.
I know you are trolling, but here is the truth: here is the truth about the Church and Extra Terrestrial Intelligent life forms.
HotBot was great until Google started to return relevant results. The Hotbot and the others started a viscous death spiral with less users they needed more ads to make up the revenue. More ads resulted in less users. I'll admit I was one o the last to finally admit Google's superiority. HotBot was so much better for a while. I never understood the initial migration to google. Maybe the interface? The cool name?