IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL IBM is giving its COBOL environment a cloudy flavour with an update to the ancient venerable and unkillable language. To the cool kids, COBOL probably looks like a zombie, complete with loose bits of decaying flesh. However it still accounts for a vast amount of operational enterprise code that's too expensive to replace all …
I suppose it must have been +20 years since I did anything with COBOL but mini skits still look good (depending on the legs) and cars still have four wheels and in decent countries a steering wheel on the right side to no surprise for kids of to day, and I have since seen code looking more "messy" than COBOL. Newer met my grand father but I think I would still like my Mustang from the year of 1965. Wonder what happened to Fortran (or was it FORTRAN) and Algol. Mona Lisa looks god too, even if I cannot understand her smile, given the times.
Fortran is still alive and well in the scientific and engineering worlds.
Where I work, most of the HPC workload is coded in a hybrid of Fortran77, 95 and a smattering of 2003 (with small bits of C glue code to do some of the things that are difficult in Fortran).
Because of the relative simplicity of Fortran, it generates very predictable code that the clock-cycle counters trying to get the maximum from their extremely expensive systems still like quite a lot. It's also pretty portable across architectures.
Does the job it was designed to do in spades.
Sensible, consistent punctuation rules that are easy to teach and use, so no missing or extra semicolons to f*ck up your week (goes double if you insist on using vi on a console to edit), inbuilt currency compatible data type so no having to watch over the shoulder of the new hire or the systems programmer slumming it in applications to guard against floating point use in the general ledger, and inbuilt intuitive support for overlaid structures.
No fuss, no muss. Write your OS-level stuff in C++, keep your finances straight with Cobol, and do whatever you want with Java but not near me. For everything in between, perl size fits all.
This announcement from IBM further demonstrates significant ongoing investments being made by the leading COBOL technology vendors, to support and enable the continuing evolution of the market for the most trusted enterprise application development technology. This can only be good news for the COBOL world at large.
Targeting the vast global mainframe COBOL application development community, Micro Focus recently launched Enterprise Developer for zEnterprise. The solution offers both on and off mainframe development, integrates simply with existing z/OS workflows and tools, and supports the major z/OS sub-systems, all from within an Eclipse-based IDE. By providing a full z/OS development system that can reside on, say, a zEnterprise zBX partition, Micro Focus enables z/OS application teams an efficient development and unit testing solution that fully harnesses the power and flexibility of zEnterprise.
Coupled with the anticipated performance improvements of z/OS COBOL apps as mentioned by IBM here, a highly productive and high performance future awaits new generations of core mainframe COBOL systems delivery.
See http://www.microfocus.com/products/enterprise/enterprise-developer.aspx
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