4 ms·

What is a good program? To me, it's a program that does something useful and serves a purpose (being this a person or an organization). I'm tired of this "good

What is a good program? To me, it's a program that does something useful and serves a purpose (being this a person or an organization). I'm tired of this "good programming", there is people that talks about good programming and than produced programs that are either too complex to do something useful. These to me are bad programs! There were a ton of companies or persons that used (and still use) BASIC (or Visual Basic) programs to do stuff, and maybe if it wasn't for BASIC these programs would probably never be written. Same thing we can say about COBOL, a ton of companies are run by an IBM AS/400 running old COBOL programs written in the 80s that still work fine.

cm2187 3y ago
Running fine isn't the only measure. It also needs to be maintainable. Those old COBOL programs are a major headache for the organisations running them. One company I worked for had to pull old COBOL developers out of retirement to implement a mandatory change to a critical program. I don't know what they will do if it happens again in 10 years. I agree with your point on companies running on VBA and how much worse the world would be without. But I still blame microsoft for making a language stuck in the 90s the only option for those users to integrate simple coding into their workflows. They are forcing users onto a bad path (and I am not complaining about the Basic syntax itself, but about the lack of the 25y of evolution and improvements you would find in VB.net).
- alerighi 3y ago
  I don't see what there is such difficult in a COBOL program to have to take a programmer out of retirement. The syntax may be different and old, but still there is no reason why a programmer can't learn it. I mean, I know people of my age (30 years) that work on companies that still maintain COBOL programs, and they learned it (some of this went to work for these companies right after high school). It's not that is rocket science, like it is not BASIC. The most difficult thing is getting a development environment set up, but a company that maintains such programs can use virtual machines and test systems. There are even companies that provide you "cloud" IBM AS/400. Anyway, what I meant is that normal companies are not Google, you find a small department of developers (in case of small companies, only one) that does everyting, from fixing the printers to developing the programs that are useful to automate and do the job the company needs to do. I've seen companies build even systems that manage an entire production plant in house with a complex business logic, something that not even commercial software that cost thousands of dollars do! With no budget, and thanks to simple programming languages (in the past was BASIC, today I say that it's python) companies write programs that helps them speed up the work, that may be an ugly file of 10.000 lines of code with few comments, copied/pasted blocks, classes with poor or no encapsulation, but that work. Saying that they are bad programs because they don't follow SOLID pricniples, or they don't do TDD or have a CI set up, or they are on a folder in file server instead of a git repository, to me is stupid. A bad program to me is a program that doesn't work, a program that has bugs, a program that doesn't solve the problem it was designed to solve.
  - ikari_pl 3y ago
    A programmer can learn it, but if it's a bank that has to implement a change in a core system, I think they simply avoid developers with zero years of Cobol experience

cm2187 3y ago

Running fine isn't the only measure. It also needs to be maintainable. Those old COBOL programs are a major headache for the organisations running them. One company I worked for had to pull old COBOL developers out of retirement to implement a mandatory change to a critical program. I don't know what they will do if it happens again in 10 years. I agree with your point on companies running on VBA and how much worse the world would be without. But I still blame microsoft for making a language stuck in the 90s the only option for those users to integrate simple coding into their workflows. They are forcing users onto a bad path (and I am not complaining about the Basic syntax itself, but about the lack of the 25y of evolution and improvements you would find in VB.net).

alerighi 3y ago
I don't see what there is such difficult in a COBOL program to have to take a programmer out of retirement. The syntax may be different and old, but still there is no reason why a programmer can't learn it. I mean, I know people of my age (30 years) that work on companies that still maintain COBOL programs, and they learned it (some of this went to work for these companies right after high school). It's not that is rocket science, like it is not BASIC. The most difficult thing is getting a development environment set up, but a company that maintains such programs can use virtual machines and test systems. There are even companies that provide you "cloud" IBM AS/400. Anyway, what I meant is that normal companies are not Google, you find a small department of developers (in case of small companies, only one) that does everyting, from fixing the printers to developing the programs that are useful to automate and do the job the company needs to do. I've seen companies build even systems that manage an entire production plant in house with a complex business logic, something that not even commercial software that cost thousands of dollars do! With no budget, and thanks to simple programming languages (in the past was BASIC, today I say that it's python) companies write programs that helps them speed up the work, that may be an ugly file of 10.000 lines of code with few comments, copied/pasted blocks, classes with poor or no encapsulation, but that work. Saying that they are bad programs because they don't follow SOLID pricniples, or they don't do TDD or have a CI set up, or they are on a folder in file server instead of a git repository, to me is stupid. A bad program to me is a program that doesn't work, a program that has bugs, a program that doesn't solve the problem it was designed to solve.
- ikari_pl 3y ago
  A programmer can learn it, but if it's a bank that has to implement a change in a core system, I think they simply avoid developers with zero years of Cobol experience