Fluff…
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my manager has questioned why we are still using cobol to develop applications and not java or something new and flashy. can you give me a few reasons why cobol is still king. thanks question posed on: 01 jul 2005
question answered by: tom ross
i get this question all the time. here is some food for thought on the topic. there is an ibm white paper on language futures for ibm mainframes. i have also included my own thoughts with some user experience with java on z/os.
my own thoughts:
the document below is the official ibm position, and really covers most points very well, but i would like to add something about cobol vs java.
in the us (as in many places) the it world is bombarded with messages about java, and some salesmen like to say that cobol is dying, etc. in fact, it is so prevalent that some companies have explored the idea of converting their cobol applications into java. one large financial us customer did a sample conversion to see how it would work. they took one of their batch cobol applications that processed input data from qsam files and produced qsam files as output, and wrote the same application in java. now the 390 favors cobol over java, and cobol has object code while java is interpreted. java was not designed to process files or business data, but the results were still surprising. the java code was 30 times slower than the cobol code the java code took 3000% more time to do the same job as cobol.
java is a very useful tool for many programming purposes, but it is not the only programming language, and it is not the best language to use in all cases. cobol is alive and well, and is still the best language to use for most business purposes. i predict that it will continue to be used in the future when java fades into the sunset that last part is just me, but who can predict the future?
note: java does not have native support for data types that include dollars and cents you have to use classes that simulate fixed point data, such as $1234.56, with floating point data. most financial institutions are not allowed to use floating-point data for financial calculations, since the rounding and less than exact nature of floating point is not exact enough. cobol, on the other hand, has fixed point decimal numbers and is designed around dollars and cents.
cobol is the dominant programming language of business, and especially on z/os. i have heard estimates that 80% of all code on mainframes is written in cobol, and i have yet to hear of a single application written in java that is running on the mainframe. there must be one out there, but i ask at every technical conference i go to and never hear about any. new applications are still written in cobol
ibm is shipping new releases of cobol every year or so, 4 releases since 2000 ibm is committed to cobol as the language of 390 and z/series, and we just put out new compilers for windows and aix too
excerpt from an ibm white paper on cobol
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o importante é sempre causa pol?mica
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my manager has questioned why we are still using cobol to develop applications and not java or something new and flashy. can you give me a few reasons why cobol is still king. thanks question posed on: 01 jul 2005
question answered by: tom ross
assembler kick ass
se o windows fosse escrito em assembler, caberia em uns 2 disquetes de 1.44mb e rodaria confortavelmente com 640 kb
serio, assembler rules
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my manager has questioned why we are still using cobol to develop applications and not java or something new and flashy. can you give me a few reasons why cobol is still king. thanks question posed on: 01 jul 2005
question answered by: tom ross
assembler kick ass
se o windows fosse escrito em assembler, caberia em uns 2 disquetes de 1.44mb e rodaria confortavelmente com 640 kb
serio, assembler rules
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