"Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution."
A lot of languages die off pretty quick or never catch on. It's hard to know ahead of time what has staying power. It was accurate to assume back then that any given new language is not likely to catch on and/or last long. Many didn't. Thus, their assumption, as stated in the article, that COBOL was a relatively short-term language was not bad assumption, statistically.
COBOL is a semi-domain-specific language (business: banking, inventory, commerce, tracking, reporting, etc.) that has a lot of features that simplified those tasks, especially before databases were common-place: sorts, merges, look-ups, etc. were built-in (although not all in the first release). It also has groupings of fields that is still fairly unique; you can reference chunks of "schemas" rather than just individual fields to save code.
"Cleaner" languages came along around the same time, but they didn't have a lot of business-oriented extras that COBOL did: one had to reinvent them, and every shop will reinvent them differently. COBOL offered some consistency in that regard to reduce the learning curve and confusion. Plus, the specification for it was more or less open-source, something fairly rare back then, outside of "research" languages.
It's the same pattern as VOIP: it's redundant to have one infrastructure network for one kind of information and a different for another. The Internet is clearly more flexible than cable (at least potentially more flexible) because you can select from myriads of content providers rather than just the forced bundles of channels that oligopolies love to offer.
Cable co's should get with the times rather than play games to hold the clock back. The cable co's can rework their strategy to provide local buffering services for content providers, for example, so that the bytes of popular shows don't have to travel as far.
While Grace Hopper is often called the "mother of COBOL," Hopper "was not one of the six people, including Sammet, who designed the language -- a fact Sammet rarely failed to point out... 'I yield to no one in my admiration for Grace,' she said. 'But she was not the mother, creator or developer of COBOL.'"
Although different people give different accounts, the gist of what happened as I gather it was that the committee became on a whole argumentative and split into generally two groups: those who wanted to just finish the project, and the others who felt better theories were needed first before laying down a language.
Because time was running out, the get-it-done group borrowed heavily from existing languages, including Grace's languages. Because their mandate was to make COBOL "English-like", Grace's work was the furthest along in this regard, at least in a practical sense. Thus, COBOL borrowed a good many ideas from Grace's languages.
From the article: "COBOL was initially intended as a short-term solution to the problem of handling business data -- a technology that might be useful for a year or two until something better came along."
Why? Even if it could technically be done, it's probably not good code from a human-readability standpoint and will have to be heavily reworked, such as variable re-naming, splitting into functions/modules, etc.
The work force still believes that simply getting a year older means they deserve a cushier job with more benefits
It used to be that experience was valued and rewarded. Do you want a newbie plumber trying to solve a tricky plumbing problem or somebody with 20 years of experience?
In tech, it's not valued so much. Maybe because technology changes so fast that too many of yester-year's skills are obsolete. Or, maybe us oldbie's need to find a way to sell the value of general IT knowledge and well-thought-out skepticism?
Somebody criticized me for saying a certain HTML5 convention would confuse our user base. The response is that newer users would be ready for the convention and the implication was that I was not up-to-speed on newer UI's. I pointed out our particular user base was non-young and that it wasn't about me. I myself didn't make the users old.
She was correct, after the fact, that she should have focused more on the issues rather than Trump's unusual personality. Trump voters don't really seem that bothered by his unusual personality, and often see it as a plus in terms of stirring up the status quo.
Blue states should get together and promise internationally to try to keep the spirit of the agreement alive in their respective states. While it may not be constitutional to make formal agreements, at least token pledges can be given.
Time to leave the troglodytes in the dust; they will drag us backward if we let them set the agenda. And they are an embarrassment to the USA.
H was mostly a "status quo" candidate, for she often talked about continuing and improving O's plans. That wouldn't sit well with the rust-belt: they wanted change. The recovery mostly skipped over them. Non-rust-belt Dems mostly voted the expected pattern.
The rust-belt is a politically tricky sell because most those factory jobs are not coming back no matter what. T blaming lopsided trade on factory loss is mostly false (automation a bigger factor), but at least he give it strong lip-service. He was at least talking about THEIR main problem.
Being honest with the rust-belt would be delivering bad news, which usually doesn't fly politically. She could have talked much more about education and re-training for new industries, but that's NOT politically competitive with T's turn-the-clock-back promise. I'm not sure Bernie's socialist tilt would fly in that area either. Middle America wants their jobs back, not more socialism. The S word is poison there.
I welcome somebody to present a viable and honest rust-belt platform that would have worked politically. Change often creates tough choices, and selling tough choices politically is very difficult. 2 Presidents telling voters to wear sweaters indoors or check tire pressure as a "solution" to energy problems fell flat, even though it's good and practical advice. Voters wanted cheap energy back, not more chores.
T found the right lie at the right place at the right time. Politics is not about logic; it's an emotional sales game. H would probably have to lie to compete.
"I'm tired of these fake reviews from Lame Stream Media reviewers. So sad. My movies are the best and everyone knows it. Believe me, this is an effort to undermine my movies by haters and losers! #MMGAfefe!"
I believe Woz is mostly right, but the reason is somewhat different. Most startups fail, probably around to 80% or 90% after 10 years. They do a lot of trial and error but mostly error (flopping). An established company cannot usually afford experimental R&D that fails 90% of the time. Who would let you run an R&D department with a 10% success rate?
Thus it's not that big co's cannot innovate, it's that innovation requires high-risk investors, perhaps suckers even, who are willing to (or inadvertently) absorb mass failures.
We've had RAD systems for decades. They make the first 80% easy, but not the last 20%. One is always dealing with things like legacy databases with goofy schemas and domain-specific intricacies.
Tools that may take longer to lay down the basics but can be tuned easier for specifies still seem the best bet.
Plus you have issues of mobile devices such that UI's need to be "responsive" to different screen sizes. These can take a lot of experimentation to get right because context is involved. They are solving 1990's problems.
he's made some pronouncements, but so far just words. Talk to me when some legislation is being voted on.
The prez does have some discretion over how visas are handed out (it is the "executive" branch, after all), and he's issued instructions to better scrutinize applications from co's who appear to hoard low-pay visas. How it actually plays out has yet to be seen. But it's got big-box outsourcers sweating.
Before you scoff, there is legitimate research in AI to write their own software to solve problems.
Paint me skeptical because these are pattern matching systems we have. They don't "think" things through. You can get maybe 80% right using such, but manually cleaning up the 20% will be a bear.
We already have RAD tech that can get you 80% pretty quick. The bottleneck is always the last 20%.
Venezuela put all their eggs in one basket: oil. There's nothing stopping capitalists from doing the same. A "comparative advantage" today is not necessarily a "comparative advantage" tomorrow, as the US Rust Belt shows.
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A lot of languages die off pretty quick or never catch on. It's hard to know ahead of time what has staying power. It was accurate to assume back then that any given new language is not likely to catch on and/or last long. Many didn't. Thus, their assumption, as stated in the article, that COBOL was a relatively short-term language was not bad assumption, statistically.
COBOL is a semi-domain-specific language (business: banking, inventory, commerce, tracking, reporting, etc.) that has a lot of features that simplified those tasks, especially before databases were common-place: sorts, merges, look-ups, etc. were built-in (although not all in the first release). It also has groupings of fields that is still fairly unique; you can reference chunks of "schemas" rather than just individual fields to save code.
"Cleaner" languages came along around the same time, but they didn't have a lot of business-oriented extras that COBOL did: one had to reinvent them, and every shop will reinvent them differently. COBOL offered some consistency in that regard to reduce the learning curve and confusion. Plus, the specification for it was more or less open-source, something fairly rare back then, outside of "research" languages.
It's the same pattern as VOIP: it's redundant to have one infrastructure network for one kind of information and a different for another. The Internet is clearly more flexible than cable (at least potentially more flexible) because you can select from myriads of content providers rather than just the forced bundles of channels that oligopolies love to offer.
Cable co's should get with the times rather than play games to hold the clock back. The cable co's can rework their strategy to provide local buffering services for content providers, for example, so that the bytes of popular shows don't have to travel as far.
Blame it on the other team.
Although different people give different accounts, the gist of what happened as I gather it was that the committee became on a whole argumentative and split into generally two groups: those who wanted to just finish the project, and the others who felt better theories were needed first before laying down a language.
Because time was running out, the get-it-done group borrowed heavily from existing languages, including Grace's languages. Because their mandate was to make COBOL "English-like", Grace's work was the furthest along in this regard, at least in a practical sense. Thus, COBOL borrowed a good many ideas from Grace's languages.
From the article: "COBOL was initially intended as a short-term solution to the problem of handling business data -- a technology that might be useful for a year or two until something better came along."
Oligopolies have been dicking consumers around for so long that they are jumping ship as soon as they find a raft.
Some co's run it if it were, and end up with short-term band-aides and put-out-fires mode of thinking that becomes institutionalized.
Why? Even if it could technically be done, it's probably not good code from a human-readability standpoint and will have to be heavily reworked, such as variable re-naming, splitting into functions/modules, etc.
Java applets tried to be an OS rather than a mere UI handler. That made it bloated and a malware magnet.
It used to be that experience was valued and rewarded. Do you want a newbie plumber trying to solve a tricky plumbing problem or somebody with 20 years of experience?
In tech, it's not valued so much. Maybe because technology changes so fast that too many of yester-year's skills are obsolete. Or, maybe us oldbie's need to find a way to sell the value of general IT knowledge and well-thought-out skepticism?
Somebody criticized me for saying a certain HTML5 convention would confuse our user base. The response is that newer users would be ready for the convention and the implication was that I was not up-to-speed on newer UI's. I pointed out our particular user base was non-young and that it wasn't about me. I myself didn't make the users old.
She was correct, after the fact, that she should have focused more on the issues rather than Trump's unusual personality. Trump voters don't really seem that bothered by his unusual personality, and often see it as a plus in terms of stirring up the status quo.
51) Have you ever touched a veiled Muslim?
52) If yes, did you enjoy it?
53) Do you eat your snot?
54) Do you pose as a creepy clown on weekends?
55) Did you vote for any creepy clowns?
He did. T is a virgin birth; the spawn of the orange deity, Cov Fefe.
Blue states should get together and promise internationally to try to keep the spirit of the agreement alive in their respective states. While it may not be constitutional to make formal agreements, at least token pledges can be given.
Time to leave the troglodytes in the dust; they will drag us backward if we let them set the agenda. And they are an embarrassment to the USA.
H was mostly a "status quo" candidate, for she often talked about continuing and improving O's plans. That wouldn't sit well with the rust-belt: they wanted change. The recovery mostly skipped over them. Non-rust-belt Dems mostly voted the expected pattern.
The rust-belt is a politically tricky sell because most those factory jobs are not coming back no matter what. T blaming lopsided trade on factory loss is mostly false (automation a bigger factor), but at least he give it strong lip-service. He was at least talking about THEIR main problem.
Being honest with the rust-belt would be delivering bad news, which usually doesn't fly politically. She could have talked much more about education and re-training for new industries, but that's NOT politically competitive with T's turn-the-clock-back promise. I'm not sure Bernie's socialist tilt would fly in that area either. Middle America wants their jobs back, not more socialism. The S word is poison there.
I welcome somebody to present a viable and honest rust-belt platform that would have worked politically. Change often creates tough choices, and selling tough choices politically is very difficult. 2 Presidents telling voters to wear sweaters indoors or check tire pressure as a "solution" to energy problems fell flat, even though it's good and practical advice. Voters wanted cheap energy back, not more chores.
T found the right lie at the right place at the right time. Politics is not about logic; it's an emotional sales game. H would probably have to lie to compete.
"I'm tired of these fake reviews from Lame Stream Media reviewers. So sad. My movies are the best and everyone knows it. Believe me, this is an effort to undermine my movies by haters and losers! #MMGAfefe!"
You'd think smart hackers would have enough brain power to find a better gang name.
I believe Woz is mostly right, but the reason is somewhat different. Most startups fail, probably around to 80% or 90% after 10 years. They do a lot of trial and error but mostly error (flopping). An established company cannot usually afford experimental R&D that fails 90% of the time. Who would let you run an R&D department with a 10% success rate?
Thus it's not that big co's cannot innovate, it's that innovation requires high-risk investors, perhaps suckers even, who are willing to (or inadvertently) absorb mass failures.
We've had RAD systems for decades. They make the first 80% easy, but not the last 20%. One is always dealing with things like legacy databases with goofy schemas and domain-specific intricacies.
Tools that may take longer to lay down the basics but can be tuned easier for specifies still seem the best bet.
Plus you have issues of mobile devices such that UI's need to be "responsive" to different screen sizes. These can take a lot of experimentation to get right because context is involved. They are solving 1990's problems.
It takes a while for market forces to stablize. When there's a food panic, market-forces won't be stable enough.
They didn't depend as heavily on oil as Venezuela. Russia sells booze and aerospace, for example.
Yes, that can screw things up also, in any system.
The prez does have some discretion over how visas are handed out (it is the "executive" branch, after all), and he's issued instructions to better scrutinize applications from co's who appear to hoard low-pay visas. How it actually plays out has yet to be seen. But it's got big-box outsourcers sweating.
"The industry is changing and I'll probably get fired. I must spread FUD!"
Can we mash Trump up into a bunch of little Trumplettes and keep the few we like and toss the rest?
Paint me skeptical because these are pattern matching systems we have. They don't "think" things through. You can get maybe 80% right using such, but manually cleaning up the 20% will be a bear.
We already have RAD tech that can get you 80% pretty quick. The bottleneck is always the last 20%.
The lying meme plutocrats use to get even plutoier.
Venezuela put all their eggs in one basket: oil. There's nothing stopping capitalists from doing the same. A "comparative advantage" today is not necessarily a "comparative advantage" tomorrow, as the US Rust Belt shows.