Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Blue White
From : tenser
Date : Wed Jan 10 2024 13:27:22

On 09 Jan 2024 at 10:02a, Blue White pondered and said...
 
 BW>  > Hey, with IBM pushing AI to translate those piles of
 BW>  > dusty COBOL into Java, maybe you'd never need it!
 BW>  
 BW> I worked in a shop that was trying to replace COBOL with Java.  They
 BW> found that, while Java did well at replacing "screen" programs, they ran
 BW> into difficulties when it came to some of the complex mathematics
 BW> and other heavy processing that happened during their nightly batch
 BW> processing.

My sense is that Java programmers favor a style that is
heavy on frameworks, design patterns, and abstraction,
often to the point of excess.  This yields all sorts of
efficiency problems, among other things.  On the other
hand, most COBOL code is straightforward transliteration
of business rules, making it fairly lean.  In some sense,
COBOL might be at a local optimum as a DSL for business
data processing; I wouldn't use it for much outside of
that, though, and if I were designing a language for
similar purposes today, I think it'd look rather different.

 BW> On the same machine, an IBM mainframe, the dusty COBOL code outperformed
 BW> what they were trying to replace it with.

Not terribly surprising.  Super-abstracted, dependency
injected, OOP-heavy Java code running in a stack-based
virtual machine JIT'd to 390 code versus native-compiled
COBOL.

 BW> AI was not the translator in this case... it was a team of COBOL and java
 BW> developers... but our experience with AI of the time was similar.
 BW> 
 BW> My experience with COBOL vs. what we called "distributed" developers was
 BW> that the latter didn't like COBOL because (1) it didn't have the same
 BW> "frameworks" that would fill in the code for them (because they couldn't
 BW> code whatever language they were supposedly coding without help), and (2)
 BW> if they could code their language on their own, whatever they were coding
 BW> would be difficult for others to read, understand, or maintain (job
 BW> security).

Maybe the AI would do better!  :-D

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