Well I have to pipe up and respond to this remark. There are a TON of COBOL 
programs here that have been running for years and years with no problems and 
reasonable performance. Once they get replaced by JAVA, etc, they abend 
constantly and perform horribly. I have yet to see 'good' JAVA code. 
If COBOL was still taught in the Colleges, then you would see the function 
libraries being built by the same folks who are now building the JAVA,etc, 
functions (with better performance...my $.02).


Jon L. Veilleux 
[email protected] 
(860) 636-2683 


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Scott
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 2:33 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Now is time for banks to replace core system according to Accenture

Well, I've got an opinion on just about everything.  I haven't seen good COBOL 
code (and I've seen a lot, so far).  To me that's enough evidence of some 
tremendous failure, somewhere--organizational or design.  That isn't to suggest 
that bad code is exclusively in COBOL's domain.  I've seen exponentially more 
code in C, Perl, Ruby, etc.  Plenty of stuff resembled what you might find in a 
Roman Vomitorium, but it's been very easy to find some beautiful, modular, 
well-crafted stuff at any company.

Unless it's being managed by CIS majors and a dozen Indian VB.NET lackeys.
Then the stuff should be nuked from orbit.

If you have some "what jesus would write if he used cobol" then I'm happy to 
see it.  My big motive for advocating Java is the Object-Oriented libraries 
that you can build and your ability to export that to other systems if the 
business case ever presents itself, with only minor changes necessary.

Scott

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Steve Comstock
<[email protected]>wrote:

> Scott wrote:
>
>> I'm not necessarily arguing for leaving the Mainframe, but cleaning 
>> up the dungheap of COBOL is long overdue and now *is* the time for that.
>>  Accenture
>> is only a company you hire if you want an offshore entity to cook 
>> your books while you bankrupt your stockholders.  Accenture is just 
>> another batch of MBA salesmen, out to plunder anything that's good or 
>> decent in the world.
>>
>>
> Well, I know that you and I disagree on this somewhat, but I think 
> that COBOL has evolved to be a pretty nifty language for what it's 
> designed to do: automate business rules.
>
> Modern COBOL can handle Unicode, ASCII, and XML. It can run as CGIs on 
> the web. And well written COBOL is easier to read than almost any 
> other programming language.
>
>
> I know we do agree that there's plenty of ugly COBOL code out there 
> (and there is plenty of ugly code out there in many languages). 
> Frankly, with the training business down so badly I would be 
> interested in looking at doing some COBOL code
> modernization: updating existing code so it follows modern COBOL 
> capabilities. Not automated, just manually fixing the code.
>
> Guess there's no accounting for taste! :-)
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Kind regards,
>
> -Steve Comstock
> The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
>
> 303-393-8716
> http://www.trainersfriend.com
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