Re: What's really wrong with COBOL?

[alawrenc@sobeco.com (a.lawrence)]

From article <8483@hubcap.clemson.edu>, by billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 ):
> From madd@world.std.com (jim frost):
>> What is this, a review of a freshman course in CS?  Have you resorted
>> to believing that all people who use cobol are "common folk, people of
>> the land (you know, morons)"?
> 
>    At my undergraduate institution, those who opted for the CIS program
>    (Computer Information Systems) rather than the CS program (Computer
>    Science) did not receive instruction regarding topics such as ADTs,
>    recursion, and so on, receiving instead extensive COBOL and database
>    knowledge without benefit of a solid computer science foundation.
> 
>    This was at Purdue University, the first institution in the world
>    to institute a computer science program... the pattern seems to have 
>    been characteristic of CIS programs at that point in time.
> 

I don't know when you did your studies in Computer Science, but I did
mine in the late 60's at the U. of Waterloo.  COBOL was never mentionned
once in the curriculum at the time and databases were still the subject
of much research and very little practicle experience.  I did recieve
a fairly good *basic* training in compiler theory, numerical methods,
basic operating systems concepts, and hardware theory.

>> Assume, for a change, that we're all professionals here and don't need
>> trivial concepts described, especially inaccurately.
> 
>    Please explicitly point out what specific statements you considered
>    inaccurate, if any.  The fact that many CIS degrees do not provide
>    their holders with adequate preparation for the task of keeping up
>    with technical advances in computer science does NOT imply any 
>    lack of professionalism on the part of the degree-holder, at least
>    from my point of view.  Your view, of course, may be different.
> 

Keeping up with the technical advances in information science is a matter
of professionalism, not basic education.  In the *REAL* world, there is
no need for the average programmer to be a "Software Engineer".  In fact,
based on over 20 years of experience, I find that perhaps 1 programmer/
analyst out of 10 in a large installation (over 100 programmer/analysts)
could even be remotely classified as a "Software Engineer"; and those
I would classify as "Software Engineers" have the strangest educational
backgrounds from high-school drop outs to PhD's in Nuclear Physics.

You may dislike COBOL, but for large _business_ systems I wouldn't use
any other language.  I can put multiple programmers to work on the same
program (I have had as many as 10 work on the same program at the same
time). The programmer who "tests/debugs" a module does not have to be the
programmer who wrote it.  Without any code generation tools I can expect
an average though put of approx. 100 line of code per man day, including
design and testing time.  The code will be portable without any special
hooks (i.e. conditional compilation lines) to any machine with a ANSI
COBOL compiler.  My programmer's won't waste time chasing bugs cased
by pointers being misused, writing special file access routines, or trying
to write their "own" function for string manipulation.

Most of what you have described in previous posts as the qualities of ADA
and deficiencies of COBOL are not a properties of the actual language being
used, but rather of the analysis and design tools being used.  No computer
language is going to make future maintenance and enhancement easier if 
proper thought is not put into the design before the first line of code
is written.  While object oriented techniques provide many advantages, there
is also a price to pay in code size and especially performance.  

---
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