About mainframe business applications, Zman writes:
| OK, but if they work, they're "good enough". Sure, you
| and I would be itching to 'fix' them, but that's an urge we | should resist.
I disagree.
My own experience of these applications has been different. Most do "work", in
the sense that they get some useful processing done; but this is the only
favorable thing that it occurs to me to say about them:
o In most shops more resources are devoted to routine, trivial maintenance,
accomplished ad hoc, than to either new-system development or significant
system extensions;
o They employ obsolete compile-time bound, move-orient[at]ed, synchronous
technology that pours concrete over their company's business plans;
o They are radically inflexible, full of ad hoc "design' limitations that
permit them to take cognizance of at most 4 or 7 widgets, at most 6 gidgets,
and the like;
o They have not been designed; they are radically incoherent because bits and
pieces of them have evolved in many different directions under many disparate
impeti;
o They reflect no understanding of the distinction between functional
requirements and processing strategies, of the notion that requirements do not
dictate implementations;
o Qua programs, they are disasters: one of the founding fathers observed long
ago that COBOL programmers could in his experience be divided into two disjoint
subsets, there were those, a moiety, who did not know what binary search was
and then there were those few who did and were pround of this arcane knowledge;
and this situation is little changed today;
o IT management is technically ill-informed, petulant, and risk-aversive.
Fatuous defense of what is will not save the platform. Nor will crackpot
realism of the if-it-isn't-broken-don't-fix-it sort.
What is worse is that moving to another environment will not usually help
either. The same people will replicate the same ills in it.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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