Re: "COBOL - the New Age Programming Language"

On Sunday 01 August 2010 11:45:26 Arik Baratz wrote:
> On 1 August 2010 05:18, Shlomi Fish <shlomif-ik1l9ssToec+JF/[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I've finished setting up a new page in my site:
> > 
> > 
> > http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/COBOL-the-New-Age-Programming-Langu
> > age/
> 
> Hi Shlomi
> 
> There's a 4th gen language called CSP that used COBOL as its back end
> (you'd generate COBOL from CSP and then compile). Where I worked they
> wrote in PL/1 when they needed low level access, not actual COBOL.

I see.

> 
> I don't really understand the point of the page, it's not like you'd find
> people disagreeing with you or people you need to convince. The call to
> action at the end of the page is really redundant if all you want to do is
> make a look-at-how-stupid-people-used-to-be page, which for the most part
> it is.

Well, it's just a parody page (notice the URL and the breadcrumbs trail, etc.) 
and in part I also wanted to parody the hypey pages of modern programming 
languages. For example, http://www.python.org/ had a photo of a NASA Astronaut 
saying "NASA uses Python", so I parodied it as "NASA uses COBOL" (which is 
true).

> 
> My opinion is that the fact that many people used it gives it some merit.
> Perhaps it was the best they had or perhaps aliens in a parallel dimension
> used their brain rays to make everyone think that COBOL is a great idea
> (and the aliens switched to C++ after). But considering today's
> alternatives, if you haven't figured out that COBOL is not the right
> language for your new project, no amount of words is going to convince you
> otherwise.
> 

I did not try to convince people to ditch COBOL, just to have some fun at its 
expense.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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