Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 12:00:23 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

What mattered in COBOL applications was no bugs. None. Not one.

*Cough* Y2K *Cough*

The process of analysing a business and creating business oriented
applications that were 100% reliable lead to system analysts working out
how to do it and passing the specification down to programmers and
testing every single module.

You *do* realize that the “waterfall” method (what you described above)
was only put up as a strawman in a 1970s research paper to advocate for
more versatile software development techniques? Nobody in the real world
worked that way -- not successfully. Because it was a recipe for producing
software that was out of date by the time it shipped.

This is big corporation stuff .

You really think big corporations like, say, Google or Facebook, work that
way?

IIRC Microfocus COBOL still makes a profit.

Microfocus makes a profit, yes. But not from its COBOL compiler.