Gartner on Assessing the Age of Software Languages and Tools
in [Cobol]
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From: klshafer on 11 Jun 2008 17:17 Gentlepeople, MicroFocus has a courtesy copy of a Gartner Report, _Assessing the Age of Software Languages and Tools_.It includes analysis and criteria for "categorizing" a programming language by "age" and offers some "management policy" recommendations. The report is free, but you will have to fill out a "contact information" form. I did so and am pleased. It is rather short, only seven pages, but to the point. The report can be accessed by going to... http://www.microfocus.com/ and then clicking on the Gartner icon under Resources. After "enough" of us have had a chance to read it, perhaps we could discuss it here. Would we need permission from Microsoft or Gartner to do that? I do not wish to "cross the line" as far as posting copyright material beyond the "fair use" limit. Ken
From: Pete Dashwood on 11 Jun 2008 18:33 <klshafer(a)att.net> wrote in message news:9c790c69-f07f-4e98-ae66-dab637893fde(a)m73g2000hsh.googlegroups.com... > Gentlepeople, > > MicroFocus has a courtesy copy of a Gartner Report, _Assessing the Age > of Software Languages and Tools_.It includes analysis and criteria for > "categorizing" a programming language by "age" and offers some > "management policy" recommendations. > > The report is free, but you will have to fill out a "contact > information" form. > > I did so and am pleased. It is rather short, only seven pages, but to > the point. > > The report can be accessed by going to... > > http://www.microfocus.com/ > > and then clicking on the Gartner icon under Resources. > > After "enough" of us have had a chance to read it, perhaps we could > discuss it here. Would we need permission from Microsoft or Gartner to > do that? I do not wish to "cross the line" as far as posting copyright > material beyond the "fair use" limit. > > Ken I read it before I saw your post here. It is the first thing from Gartner that I have read for a very long time, without bursting into laughter... :-) I think it is fair and pretty well balanced. It was of particular interest to me at the moment as I am assisting a client to migrate from COBOL to C# (from "aging" to "adult"), and most of the criteria identified in the Gartner report were critieria we had already identified as pertinent reasons for migrating. MicroFocus are promoting it because it shows their implementation of COBOL as "mature" and, while that isn't as good as "adult", it is better than "aging"...:-) (It showed most other implementations of COBOL as "aging" or "elderly", with the exception of IBM, of course. Both IBM and MicroFocus are clients of Gartner... :-)) Despite having some pretty strong vested interests in COBOL survival, Gartner are giving it 10 years. (I give it 7 (2015)...and did so 10 years ago) One important point they made in their "8 criteria" is the availability of vendor support and the continued commitment by vendors. I think that is very pertinent. MicroFocus took over AcuCOBOL and that could be seen as a continuing commitment to COBOL. IBM have little choice but to continue support for COBOL at least for now... IBM have diversified and COULD pull support for COBOL long term without seriously affecting their revenue base. They are offering migration paths for their customers and behaving as you would hope a responsible vendor might do. Fujitsu, for example, are NOT doing that. Anyone who committed to PowerCOBOL is simply out in the cold with no migration path on the horizon and the NetCOBOL for .NET product providing no backward compatibility and not even a full .NET implementation. Clues? Don't be surprised to see Fujitsu move away from COBOL... Maybe not tomorrow, but could be the day after... MicroFocus are a one trick pony and are currently committed to COBOL. They have a lively customer base and NetExpress is a success story, even despite the run time fees, which would simply bar many SMEs from considering it. By providing "off loaded" COBOL development so that mainframe applications can be developed in COBOL on workstations, they are tying their future to the future of COBOL on the mainframe. (Client/Server development in COBOL (apart from sites already committed to mainframe COBOL), is almost a twitching corpse...) It may be that they will shadow the migration path offered by IBM and assist clients into Java, long term. Both MicroFocus and IBM are pushing SOA as a means of leveraging legacy applications, and this makes sense, in my opinion. The paper from Gartner will stimulate many managers to look at the state of their COBOL apps and assess future directions. Personally, I don't think it will extend the life of COBOL. Pete. -- "I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."
From: Rene_Surop on 11 Jun 2008 20:49 On Jun 12, 6:33 am, "Pete Dashwood" <dashw...(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> wrote: > > MicroFocus are a one trick pony and are currently committed to COBOL. They > have a lively customer base and NetExpress is a success story, even despite > the run time fees, which would simply bar many SMEs from considering it. > MF NetExpress devtool is very powerful and considering that the language is pretty easy to learn, your comment above Pete (on SMEs) is the 'only' hindrance why we somehow avoid to implement its application. NetExpress Application Server is eating most of the IT budget. If this will continue, which I think it will because Cobol monopoly is an asset to them.... then who knows, your prediction may come true. But then again and putting myself into their position, who on earth will discontinue its business monopoly. Microsoft does. Tough choice for the corporate arena.
From: Robert on 11 Jun 2008 21:15 On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:33:19 +1200, "Pete Dashwood" <dashwood(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> wrote: > (Client/Server development in COBOL (apart >from sites already committed to mainframe COBOL), is almost a twitching >corpse...) If you received a phone bill, there is a 60-70% probability it was produced by Amdocs Ensamble written in Cobol and running on Unix. The system was rewritten in C++ seven years ago and called Enabler. Enabler has not replaced Ensamble anywhere Ensamble was already installed, AFIK. The US federal student loan system is Cobol on Unix. Most US state child welfare systems are Cobol on Unix. Tens of thousands of organizations, including Air New Zealand, run Peoplesoft ERP and/or HRMS on Unix. It is written in Cobol and Peoplecode. About 4,000 run Lawson ERP, written entirely in Cobol, on Unix. None of this runs on mainframe. Most of the sites don't have a mainframe. Cobol is dead on the client side, but not on the server. And there is more batch processing than people realize. There is a batch process involved every time you hear 'three to five business days.'
From: Michael Wojcik on 12 Jun 2008 11:29
Pete Dashwood wrote: > (Client/Server development in COBOL (apart > from sites already committed to mainframe COBOL), is almost a twitching > corpse...) It's doing some Romero-level twitching, then. We have a lot of customers with no mainframe COBOL (or mainframes) at all, writing client-server apps. Some of those are ISVs who are among the largest in their sectors. I expect COBOL will still be in widespread use in 2015, simply because the industry does not, in fact, move very quickly. There's still a lot of Fortran and C development. Even APL still has an active community of professional developers. There's been almost no movement in general programming toward better (more expressive, safer) languages like OCaml. The success stories for improvements in software development, like widespread (though by no means universal) adoption of OO in general-purpose programming, investigation of agile and empirical development processes and adoption where appropriate, and so forth are hugely overshadowed by the industry's overall conservatism and inertia. Most general-purpose software is still essentially produced the way it was thirty years ago, with little evidence that we've learned anything about software development since then. Not long ago I got a query from a major corporate customer about a product that hasn't had a significant release in ten years. They're running it on OS/2. There's a migration path; they just don't see any justification for taking it, unless and until they're forced to. That's generally the case with the industry. IPv6 still isn't widely used. IE/MSHTML still doesn't support XHTML correctly. (Hell, it doesn't support HTML correctly, even in IE8, though it's finally getting close.) Good security practices are still not widespread. It's not like any of these things are particularly hard to fix - they're just not compelling. Seven years is *far* too short a time for even a majority of existing COBOL users to decide to transition to some other language, much less actually make that change. It doesn't matter whether the superiority of the alternative is self-evident. And it isn't; COBOL is pretty good for what it does, especially well-written modern COBOL. And mixed-language development is finally beginning to become significant in general-purpose applications, particularly in the .NET environment. COBOL.NET does everything that any other .NET language does. It's a better (cleaner, more expressive) language than C++.NET (which is a nasty amalgamation of incompatible programming approaches), arguably better than VB.NET (because VB is just inelegant), and about equivalent to C#. (It's not as good as F#, probably the best .NET language, or the .NET implementation of Ruby, but then no straight procedural-OO language will be.) COBOL.NET may never be a significant player, but it won't be because other languages are superior. Other languages for that environment mostly *aren't* superior, and the ones that are don't see widespread use, because most shops simply don't care to move to better tools or approaches. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University |