It's *so* weird! Imagine writing this: "Sarah, age 23, rejected her college advisor's career advice and started work at Boeing in Seattle last year. Her friends who mainly pursued careers in banking and law outright laugh at her for designing airplanes, the antiquated vehicles invented well over a century ago. But Sarah takes their ribbing in stride even as she works on designs that past generations of engineers could mostly comprehend."
Or this: "Last night Olivia Rodrigo won the 2022 GRAMMY for Best New Artist. It's ironic that the Recording Academy uses the word 'new' to describe any award they hand out. Audio recording was invented all the way back in the 1800s with only modest incremental improvements since. And it's particularly galling that Rodrigo has never publicly thanked Thomas Edison and other music recording pioneers for contributing to her success in the ancient industry she chose. Of course everyone knows music is dying. One analyst in Ecuador predicts that within 10 years the number of people who listen to music at least once per day will fall by 92.4%." Here's how I think of programming languages. There's a very short list of programming languages that are both so common, so useful, and (relatedly) so adaptable (incrementally improved, integrated, extended, etc.) that they have (for all intents and purposes) achieved "immortality." COBOL is definitely on this distinguished short list. Other things being equal it's a great characteristic when you're making investment choices including career choices. It just doesn't matter that (for example) the C programming language was ostensibly born circa 1969 (with an earlier implementation, the B programming language) and COBOL was first specified in 1960. If in 2022 you want to assign any significance to a ~9 year difference in birth dates to make some sort of utility argument then you're (in a word) crazy. The C programming language is another entry on the distinguished short list, but it just so happens it's a pretty awful programming language for most business application programming. Which leads to an interesting thought exercise. In 2022 if you're trying to choose a programming language for business application programming that stands the best chance of being durable (being realistically maintainable, extendable, enhance-able) for the next 40+ years — a common requirement for many high value, nontrivial business applications — what programming language would you choose? I suggest Enterprise COBOL ought to be a candidate. (Any other nominations?) — — — — — Timothy Sipples Senior Architect Digital Assets, Industry Solutions, and Cybersecurity IBM zSystems/LinuxONE, Asia-Pacific [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
