Re: Article on new mainframe use

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 22:06:16 +0300, Niklas Holsti wrote:

Dewar used to say that COBOL is the "Rodney Dangerfield of programming
languages", which just "don't get no respect".

Except people laughed *with* Rodney Dangerfield, whereas they laugh *at*
COBOL. For Dangerfield, it was just an act, after all: you don’t think his
real life was like that, do you?

COBOL was designed specifically for “business” computing, back when there
was a clearly demarcation of what this meant: no need for complex
mathematical formulae, no need for string/text manipulation, no need for
interactive terminals.

One major crack in this wall came with the introduction of relational
DBMSes, particularly ones using SQL as their interface language: suddenly,
the use of such databases became very much a core “business” need.

The best way to interface to such a DBMS was to be able to generate SQL
strings on the fly; but this required some facility with manipulation of
dynamic, variable-length strings, which COBOL completely lacked. And so
special extensions were tacked on, just to cope with the generation of SQL
queries and templates.