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I propose that most of the code written in the old days, in COBOL in particular, was not done by computer scientists. There were many lanes for learning COBOL,
by bdavis__ 7y ago
I propose that most of the code written in the old days, in COBOL in particular, was not done by computer scientists. There were many lanes for learning COBOL, and they included community colleges and industry training courses.
The amount of "computer science / software engineering" concepts that were widely known (or even possible) in those days was very limited.
're-engineering' the code is a valid operation, but the amount of code is extreme. and without a deep testing regime, a dangerous journey.
so, we keep on keeping on. the same way.
- FlyMoreRockets 7y agoThis is true. Back in the day, COBOL was marketed to businiess people as an easy to learn code to just get stuff done. Serious programming was done with FORTRAN.
- bdavis__ 7y agostill true today. (not really, but there is a lot of f77 out there...)
- eyegor 7y agoI don't know anyone who uses f77 anymore, but f90 and up is still popular in scientific research.
- Koshkin 7y agoActually, FORTRAN was marketed to scientists, not for "serious programming" which was still done in assembler.
- WorldMaker 7y agoWhy sometimes still today someone's Jupyter notebook of data science Python is calling into FORTRAN libraries under the hood.
- perl4ever 7y agoI believe COBOL was invented prior to the first computer science department in the US, never mind CS degrees becoming a common thing.