2 ms·
I have no idea what this guy is trying to say by comparing Ruby to COBOL. Is he trying to say that Ruby is just another flash in the pan, like COBOL? Or is he
by mechanical_fish 18y ago
I have no idea what this guy is trying to say by comparing Ruby to COBOL.
Is he trying to say that Ruby is just another flash in the pan, like COBOL?
Or is he suggesting that some of today's Ruby code might still be running in vital systems fifty years from now?
Neither of those arguments would seem to have much to do with his main point. Could it be that he's trying to imply that language innovation has been a chimera for fifty years and we should all have been satisfied with COBOL? Surely nobody could be that much of a Blub fundamentalist!
Or, you know, maybe this whole essay makes no sense.
- orib 18y agoAs far as I can tell, he's saying that history repeats itself, and the same sort of itch that Ruby on Rails scratches was also scratched in Cobol. This is definitely a recurring theme in computing -- "what's old is new again", "those who dont' know history are doomed to repeat it", and so on. I can't judge the accuracy of this statement, and I definitely disagree with his conclusion that new languages are bad. I do long for a common ABI (like VMS had, for that matter) though. It seems like Microsoft is aiming for this with the CLR. What's old is new again.
- raganwald 18y ago"Could it be that he's trying to imply that language innovation has been a chimera for fifty years and we should all have been satisfied with COBOL?" What's interesting about that sentence is what happens if you replace COBOL with L---, aw shucks, let's not go there...
- bcostlow 18y agoI'd like to announce the alpha of the new MVC stack rapid web development framework I'm developing: Cobol on Cart Horses...