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• 2004, huh? (Score:5, Interesting)

  by brian_d_foy (44)

  I guess their editorial cycle is really long. For instance, hasn't "utility computing" been around as long as the computer (and I don't just mean the electronic ones)? They say it is "Pay only for the processing power you use."
  
  Well, back in the Day, when DEC was strong and I was using VMS at government labs, I saw accounting numbers for how many cycles I used and how much that would cost our group.
  
  This is just another example of my notion, which I hope to turn into an idea, that so-called utility computi
  • Re:2004, huh? (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709) on 2003.12.03 16:56 (#26275) Homepage Journal

    Great reply. I only have one teeny side comment:

    Why are things like ColdFusion and PHP so popular now? Because Perl was popular before. It will come around again, maybe with a different language or technology, but people swing back and forth between flexibility and ease. How long ago was COBOL created?

    I think the example of COBOL weakens your argument. Consider the era in which it was created. New language technologies weren't coming around the way that they are now and COBOL had no serious competition. As a result, we have many billions of dollars worth of COBOL code strewn around the world and when a company is looking at their multi-million dollar COBOL code base and thinking about migration, they think "large projects fail" (and they're right). Further, the business rules embedded in decades of COBOL code are mostly known by older programmers, many of whom aren't going to look at Java or Perl and really understand what's going on. It's like being used to working on a Ford Model T and being handed a Ford Taurus: you'll likely recognize what's under the hood, but you can't even do a tune-up.

    In other words, COBOL hangs on because regardless of whatever business cycles were taking place in the sixties and seventies, choosing anything but COBOL was not part of that cycle and now it's often deemed too expensive to replace. Today, the choice of COBOL is not subject to cycles the way that the choice of ColdFusion and PHP are, but the article was speculating about evolutionary trends (a model COBOL fits) rather than cyclical ones (which ColdFusion and PHP fit).

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    • Re:2004, huh? (Score:2)

      by brian_d_foy (44)

      I was not trying to make a comment on COBOL itself, but rather the notion that a natural language, executive friendly language was the way to go. Now that I think of it, that's SQL too.