Posted on 07/21/2009 5:31:52 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
With all the COBOL love flowing here, let’s take a second to remember that great comptuer pioneer, Admiral Grace Hopper, the mother of COBOL (and finder of the first literal computer bug and the one who first implemented language standards). It may look antiquated now, but it was revolutionary in the 60s.
COBOL if it still works, why fix it.
What do you guys think about Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)?
Very true. I work for a small section of the Dept of Education that is using such an old legacy system that there is only one (very old) employee left in the whole nation who knows the programming (”Easytrieve”).
When he retires I don’t know what we’ll do. No contractor wants to get involved with such old boring stuff, and no federal employees can seem to learn to program.
We can’t get a new system because when we try to get new huge expensive contracts to do so, they somehow fall apart and fail.
I guess that also leaves out anyone who can re-punch an employee’s payroll information on a card when the damn reader eats it? (sarc. extreme)
I had a buddy who received a panic call about some machine that he had done that had some bug that couldn't be described very well but which it was imperative had to be fixed immediately. So he gets on a plane, goes to the plant and checks in. He's sent out to the machine to check it out. Well, he operates it a few cycles and can't seem to find anything out of order. Tells the powers that be, who say they'll send out the operator to demo the problem. So the guy comes out and he presses several buttons on the control panel simultaneously, while reaching way out with his foot to trip some sensor in the machine, causing the machine to malfunction in some way. That was the "bug".
I knew another guy who was on site commissioning some equipment which was functional enough to use and needed to be. So during the day, he would do software things he could do online (the platform allows online edits without a restart), then after hours do more invasive things he couldn't do while running. So he comes in the next morning and is told the machine won't start. Goes over to the machine, presses "Start" on the touchscreen, and wham-o, magick-o it starts. Turns out the operator can't read (!) and has learned to operate the touchscreen by remembering button positions. The guy had moved the location of the start button the previous night to make room on the screen for some added features.
So anytime you think you've constructed a foolproof system, the universe simply starts supplying a better grade of fools.
Old school data processing.....those were the days!....Mag tapes dumping in the vacume column...cards getting mangled in the reader. That damn ball and string on the master console breaking during an IPL....Many bars were filled with D.P. people after hours.....
So long as the COBOL systems function, can be updated at moderate/reasonable costs, and developers/maintainers can be found, COBOL will continue to thrive. There’s just too much vested in those systems to risk making a multi-billion-dollar transition to a new system which does exactly the same thing.
One fact of programming: legacy systems embody a great deal of wisdom which is not otherwise documented or known. Wholesale replacement of a system is a tremendous risk precisely because those creating the new system don’t know what vital yet obscure processes are performed by the old. Such replacement rarely happens unless there is an imperative to do so, such as outright parts obsolescence or skyrocketing cost of maintenance. In the case of big-iron legacy systems, it’s cheaper to teach someone an old language.
Kinda like Latin: allegedly dead, yet there is still great value in learning and using it in narrow yet big-budget “systems”.
Gracie Hopper! (Doffs hat, hand over heart). Ur-Geek before being a geek was cool and even before being a geek wasn’t cool.
The latest incarnation is Object-Oriented Cobol for the Java Virtual Machine. Much as we want it to be, and as terrifying as that concept is, COBOL isn't dead yet.
If it finally dies, methinks it will be because no self-respecting programmer will learn it.
Live, yes. Thrive, no.
The world is OOP now for lots of good reasons.
Maybe, but not dead. Seen just a few days ago:
Recent standout demo 'Pimp My Spectrum' – a collection of complex effects and in-jokes wrapped in comforting Spectrum colour-clash – essentially involved creator Ate Bit redesigning the 8-bit computer on the fly. "Technically, it was fairly straightforward. The hard bit was coming up with the concept, story-boarding it, getting the art and music assets created and then putting it all together before the deadline," says coder Paul Grenfel. "I mean, it's got a simple Z80 emulator in there and a load of Z80 code to run the demo, as well as a software rasteriser for the 3D and an AY emulator, but none of those were that tricky to write." The demo, technically a 64kB PC intro, sticks to its Z80 principles but shows off effects that wouldn't have been considered possible on the venerable processor in its heydey.OK, so it's really obscure - but it ain't dead.
(BTW: I wonder what the going price is on my old and nearly perfect copy of "Captain Zilog" comic book is...)
I worked on those. My recollection is that, while the decimal and floating point instruction sets were extra-cost options, all S/360s had index registers. However, not all S/360 instructions could use them. For instance, the Move Immediate instruction could not use an index register because the right half of the immediate byte took up the bit field that would have specified which index register to use.
Also, the assembler had a glitch with regard to index registers. If you were not using an index register, and you forgot to put a comma before your intended base register, the assembler would output an instruction that had an index register but no base register. Your program would still work, but would be slower because the CPU would waste an extra cycle adding in zero. Someone I knew wrote a utility program in assembly language to go through old source code and fix instances where coders had made that mistake.
On one hand you have users who can crash a system.
You haven’t been doing your job if they can do that in normal use. But even if they’re being stupid you should not let them crash it. The monkey test on the keyboard (or buttons) is a popular QA test. The meaner QA people will literally unplug your database or application server in the middle of something. But the meaner QA means less chance of a user being able to screw it up. You do have to protect them from themselves to some extent.
On the start button, good UI principles can erase a lot of user complaints, but at some point you just can’t overcome a user’s stupidity. I’ve seen someone printing over and over and over and complaining the printer’s not working. He had the Microsoft XPS writer set as his default printer. You can’t really do anything about that but try to educate them.
Except on a Mac you see a picture of the printer you’re printing to, so he may have figured out a similiar situation on a Mac by himself.
I always had the attitude that QA is helping me make my program better. In the end I get the credit for writing the program anyway, and QA just helps make me look good. Nobody ever thanks QA.
And COND codes.
-PJ
I empathize. C was developed to make it easier to develop the UNIX operating system. Then it started to get used to develop everything, and it wasn't pretty.
What I always hate is after ship when the customers run into something then everybody starts asking how QA missed that, without bothering to notice that QA was writing 5 bugs per person per day for the whole project. How’d we miss it, we were busy with other bugs.
Oh well, that’s life. It’s nice when the bugs out in the field are minor.
I would say "Monkey hit the button," but apparently your humans can't even find the button. They'll always build a better idiot.
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