Re: Legacy question

Not to get off-topic :-)

Yeah, I'd agree about COBOL. On the very rare occasions I meet someone who
wants to go into writing software and wants a job for life (but the punk-a$$
kids these days raraely do...), I tell 'em to learn COBOL. With the advent
of SOX, HIPAA etc., there is less and less incentive for companies to move
away from a (working) application written in COBOL simply because it seems
like an old language. If necessary, they'll pretty-up the front end and
write new stuff in Java or whatever, but I'd guess there will be millions
(billions?) of lines of COBOL code going in 20 years.

I maintan several million lines of PL/I on a daily basis. There's probably
not as much of it as there used to be, but it would certainly fall into the
category of a language where there are programs which still run exactly as
they did when they were written 20 years ago.

As for C... well if it's an ANSI-compliant application written using
'standard' API's etc, it should be usable on a lot of platforms, now and in
the future. Mind you, how many C business applications really are
ANSI-compliant?!?

Rory


On 12/10/06, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Rory Hewitt
>
> Joe,
>
> Let's not forget COBOL, PL/I and (I guess) C...
>
> Rory

Actually, of the three, I think only COBOL passes this test.  COBOL is
still
around, and it's going strong in the mainframe world, and in some other
arenas where things like TCO still matter.  Personally, I consider RPG and
COBOL nearly interchangeable -- one of my nicknames for RPG is "shorthand
for COBOL" (the other is "assembly language for the database").

I don't know enough about PL/I, but I don't think there is much business
software written in it.  C has lots of programmers but since it's so close
to the metal it tends to go out of date with the OS.  So that while maybe
C
on the iSeries may manage to survive for a long time (I don't know), C
written for DOS didn't port nicely to Windows, and C written for Windows
isn't going to play nicely in .NET.

Joe

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