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Sticking to the technical discussion. I agree that some businesses would have to close for Cobol. That number goes down each year, with Java it is still going u

by sqeaky 10y ago

Sticking to the technical discussion. I agree that some businesses would have to close for Cobol. That number goes down each year, with Java it is still going up. I just the picked the financial sector because we all know about banks and most of us have insurance, so its visible. I also worked a contract at Nationwide (who could do limited business without Cobol, but not without Java) and got to see both in operation. There are many less visible things that would fail but could have more impact. Without Java the US military is in trouble, a majority of cell phones stop working, the printer in the office I am now fails, Netflix has some level of problems and more and more... It is debatable that Java is the single most widely deployed programming languages. I say debatable, because many of those JVMs were written in C and many of the kernels (when they need a kernel) JVMS run on are written in C, where do we draw that line. If Java were not practical this would not have been possible. I suspect it would have looked more like Cobol, with shops of experts being able to run and maintain it, but failing and migrating away as time went on.

Jach 10y ago
There's not much technical discussion to be had when our views of practicality are so different, and practicality itself so subjective and context-dependent. If Java starts to smell like COBOL across the wider industry (not just HN types) will it no longer be practical, because it no longer satisfies the narrow criteria "has been deployed in critical applications and is not being migrated away from"[0]? What about the great tooling/perf/backwards compatibility/ecosystem mentioned, do those not matter at all for practicality concerns? I'm not sure. Maybe we'll just agree that practicality is a low bar to satisfy and shouldn't be a high concern for much? Reminds me of the discussions around WorseIsBetter, and a quote from Wayne Mack[1]. [0] I've heard from COBOL forums that the amount of new COBOL written each day and existing in the world keeps increasing; they've even got Object-Oriented COBOL now. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if COBOL had the same market pressures Java does (plus university pressure) and if the world was basically stuck with it in the same way we've had Java this century that we wouldn't be able to push it to service our needs. [1] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign http://wiki.c2.com/?TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign "I believe it is time to explicitly state the long held secret of software, we do not need to do design; design is ineffective and costly."

by sqeaky 10y ago

Jach 10y ago

There's not much technical discussion to be had when our views of practicality are so different, and practicality itself so subjective and context-dependent. If Java starts to smell like COBOL across the wider industry (not just HN types) will it no longer be practical, because it no longer satisfies the narrow criteria "has been deployed in critical applications and is not being migrated away from"[0]? What about the great tooling/perf/backwards compatibility/ecosystem mentioned, do those not matter at all for practicality concerns? I'm not sure. Maybe we'll just agree that practicality is a low bar to satisfy and shouldn't be a high concern for much? Reminds me of the discussions around WorseIsBetter, and a quote from Wayne Mack[1]. [0] I've heard from COBOL forums that the amount of new COBOL written each day and existing in the world keeps increasing; they've even got Object-Oriented COBOL now. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if COBOL had the same market pressures Java does (plus university pressure) and if the world was basically stuck with it in the same way we've had Java this century that we wouldn't be able to push it to service our needs. [1] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign http://wiki.c2.com/?TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign "I believe it is time to explicitly state the long held secret of software, we do not need to do design; design is ineffective and costly."