On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 16:10:02 -0400, Phil Smith III <li...@akphs.com> wrote:
>Sigh: > >https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a32095395/cobol-programming-language-covid-19/ > At the end it really goes off the rails when it starts making performance assumptions that Java would be impossibly slow, and maybe Python would be better. Python is on my list of "one of these days I should probably learn that", but from my limited Python knowledge that seemed really unlikely that Python would be faster than Java. Some simple googling around confirms that it's really hard to find any references to Python being faster than Java for anything but trivial scripts. Although there are apparently some ways to compile Python, Python's loose typing is often cited as a potential performance limitation as well. And in real life Java is definitely not always slower than COBOL. Just-in-time compilation can result in more performant object code than ahead-of-time compilation, especially when "ahead-of-time" means "a decade ago for a target machine that was not real new even then". And Java runs on the zIIPs, which can be a significant advantage in some environments. But I would be surprised to find a case where COBOL isn't the most memory efficient. Scott Chapman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
