One interesting side note of these slides is the productivity they got by going with a rewriting-oriented language/framework. Those always seem to let projects move fast regardless of what they’re tackling. Here’s that framework plus a few more:
Far as COBOL itself, it’s a complex language that let non-programmers and low-cost programmers keep businesses going for decades. Quite an accomplishment in deployment or economic sense much like C was for efficient use of low-end hardware. Although COBOL itself might be unworthy, the vast amount of code out there running mission critical systems designed piecemeal over decades does make it an interesting research problem for things such as static analysis or automated rewriting. Semantic Designs’ toolkit probably leads in that.
I mean, unworthy or not, I think it’s fair to say that COBOL was designed to accomplish a very specific goal, and it accomplished that goal so successfully that half the world still runs on COBOL somewhere in the background.
Well, it’s a general-purpose language that was used for a lot of stuff. I agree with your interpretation for a lot of its success given it fit the common apps really well.
Their site with project links:
http://www.cs.vu.nl/Cobol/
One interesting side note of these slides is the productivity they got by going with a rewriting-oriented language/framework. Those always seem to let projects move fast regardless of what they’re tackling. Here’s that framework plus a few more:
http://www.meta-environment.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Term-rewriting_programming_languages
Far as COBOL itself, it’s a complex language that let non-programmers and low-cost programmers keep businesses going for decades. Quite an accomplishment in deployment or economic sense much like C was for efficient use of low-end hardware. Although COBOL itself might be unworthy, the vast amount of code out there running mission critical systems designed piecemeal over decades does make it an interesting research problem for things such as static analysis or automated rewriting. Semantic Designs’ toolkit probably leads in that.
I mean, unworthy or not, I think it’s fair to say that COBOL was designed to accomplish a very specific goal, and it accomplished that goal so successfully that half the world still runs on COBOL somewhere in the background.
Well, it’s a general-purpose language that was used for a lot of stuff. I agree with your interpretation for a lot of its success given it fit the common apps really well.