Re: An odd thing

["Chris Rehm" <Mr.AS400@xxxxxxx>]

>There are probably billions if not trillions of lines of COBOL out there,
>and a
>lot of programmers that can write it. An interesting unscientific
>observation, on
>the AS/400 I have seen better code from Midrange RPG programmers that have
>learned COBOL, than Mainframe COBOL programmers that attempt to write
>COBOL. The
>key seems to be that mainframe techniques will work, but they ignore all
>of the
>productivity enhancements IBM has made to COBOL.

Bob, I agree with a lot of what you say. However, I am not sure that Cobol
offers much over what is available with other languages. 

For instance, if I was looking for a language that I could port to other
machines (and I sort of had my head stuck in the sand about Java), I would
probably look to C or C++ as languages supported on a lot of platforms. 

One thing is that C programmers will cost less than COBOL programmers
since there are tons of extra C programmers lying around. 

I don't think there is a problem with the language Cobol, I just don't
think it is such a good choice as a strategic direction for a company
starting product development. I think that is doubly so for a company that
has no COBOL programmers on staff but does have RPG programmers and
AS/400s.

>FWIW,
>Bob Larkin
>blarkin@wt.net



Chris Rehm
Mr.AS400@ibm.net
You have to ask yourself, "How often can I afford to be unexpectedly out of 
business?" 
Get an AS/400.
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