Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : tenser
From : Blue White
Date : Tue Jan 09 2024 10:02:24

 > Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
 > dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!
 
I worked in a shop that was trying to replace COBOL with Java.  They
found that, while Java did well at replacing "screen" programs, they ran
into difficulties when it came to some of the complex mathematics
and other heavy processing that happened during their nightly batch
processing.
 
On the same machine, an IBM mainframe, the dusty COBOL code outperformed
what they were trying to replace it with.

AI was not the translator in this case... it was a team of COBOL and java
developers... but our experience with AI of the time was similar.

My experience with COBOL vs. what we called "distributed" developers was
that the latter didn't like COBOL because (1) it didn't have the same
"frameworks" that would fill in the code for them (because they couldn't
code whatever language they were supposedly coding without help), and (2)
if they could code their language on their own, whatever they were coding
would be difficult for others to read, understand, or maintain (job
security).
 
COBOL has put food on my table for roughly 27 years now.  I am glad I
learned it.


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