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From: ext_iai@gsbacd.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: alt.cobol,comp.lang.ada,comp.infosystems
Subject: Re: What's really wrong with COBOL?
Message-ID: <8151@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 29 Mar 90 00:52:56 GMT
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Organization: University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

>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.
> 

I am surprised (due to my lack of knowledge, I am sure) to hear that COBOL
is still a serious system development tool outside of places like EDS which
(according to their sunk cost fallacy management style) has spent huge
amounts developing tools for managing COBOL programmers...  The things which
you laud about COBOL development do not seem, to me, to be unique to COBOL.
Is their a specific kind of application or hardware platform that your points
are true for?  Would you say that UNIX is not a serious business OS platform?
Would you use COBOL on a UNIX system?  What kind of user interfaces does
COBOL support -- or are you using a client-server architecture which allows
for user interfaces to be developed on completely different platforms?  
Forgive my naive questions, I just want to learn and all of my CS work has
been in assembly, C, and various "small system" OS...

yours,

Edward Shelton
Mgr, Operations and Technology
Information Arts Inc.
ext_IAI@gsbacd.uchicago.edu