[Sussex] On the Other hand

[Geoff Teale]

Gareth wrote:
-------------
> You just said my worst nightmare word 'Cobol' I was forced to 
> do this during
> my college years. but luckely I did bugger all of it and pulled of a
> D (Distinction) which was suprising. but i found using Cobol 
> just a repative
> and pointless exercise. still i'm sure there are a hell of a 
> lot of Cobol
> systems still running.

He he.  :)

There are a lot of people out there who love COBOL still so be careful what
you say you scampish young whipper-snapper ;)

THe number of people here who've lectured me about how they were real
programmers because they used to program in COBOL... *sigh*

The thing is, in the business world at least, 90% of programming is all the
same - connect to a database, do a few updates / queries and then maybe
write some import/export routines and the odd report - frankly it sucks.  

As languages for doing this kind of work go, your best bet in terms of speed
of development are simple 4GL tools.  Unfortunately 4GL tools commonly
(historically) lack some features that business developers need, and as
companies seem to like to minimise the number of languages they are actively
using it often happens that VB is now the language of choice. Of course it
is also the simplest language that Microsoft offer - which is a major factor
for your average manager - BTW, I found a chart of management types at my
local vets surgery.. interesting to see that the most popular type of
manager in the world is the "Romney Marsh"...baaaaaa...

Back in the days of mainframes and minicomputers (those times are coming
again..) COBOL was the language-du-jour for business and it's interesting to
see that COBOL is becoming a factor in LINUX adoption.  Aparantly
theKompany's KOBOL (COBOL in a KDE environment) is becoming a big seller on
the continent and in southern Asia... ho hum..

COBOL is at least reasonably simple - VB is far too complex a beast for 90%
of the work it is used for (and for 90% of people using it).  Trouble is,
you get a lot of complexity without all the power of a language like Delphi
(Object Pascal).  Frankly I think a language like Python or Ruby could
handle everything VB has to do in the window's environment and do it far
more elegantly.  Dammit, Java is a cleaner language than VB, less open to
crapness and easier to read...


ok... rant mode off...

Angry this morning..

-- 
GJT
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk




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