copmaring cobol to other languages 2

[obie]

I have to do a model and I also have some factors. So, please if you have any information on any of the factors white about it. For example, COST: How expensive is a basic Cobol compiler compared to the other languages listed or In regards to run time how fast is Cobol. Listed below are the remaining factors. You can write about any of the factors you know about. Below are the factors:
1. COMPILING SPEED
2. EXCUTION SPEED
3. COST
4. UPGRADES
5. FLEXIBILITY (WHAT PLATFORMS OR OPERATING SYSTEMS IN CAN RUN ON)
6. OBJECT ORIENTED
7. QUICK RESULTS
8. PREFFERED
9. DEMAND FOR JOB MARKET (PAYS MORE)
10. DATABASE INTEGRATION
11. DIFFICULTY (HOW HARD TO LEARN)
12. DEMAND IN UNIVERSITIES
13. QUALIFIED TEACHERS
14. ALLROUNDER (CAN BE USED GENERALLY)
15. MAINTAINANCE (EASY TO MAINTAIN?)
16. PORTABILITY (HOW PORTABLE?)

 

[Crox]

1.    COMPILING SPEED
This depends on the compiler. CA-REALIA is very fast. There are others less fast.
2.    EXCUTION SPEED
The execution speed of CA-REALIA is amazing, most of the time much faster than most of the C compilers. You can download a program at CA's site with the name COBVSC which contains a good compare between COBOL and C. I took CA-REALIA in the time that there was a magazine called PC-TECH. It compared many COBOL compilers. At that time, CA-REALIA was called REALIA because it was a small company on its own. It was bought by Pansophic which was bought by Computer Associates. Computer Associates is most of the time only looking for the big companies, not the smaller ones like I have. It would be great if they sold their compiler by postorder like before, but I am to little to convince them about this.
3.    COST
I don't know recent prices but they are climbing, that is what I know. In the early days you could buy a copy for only US$ 699. The last time it was a contract for 5 years with initially Dutch guilder: Fl 1400 and Fl 500,- each year extra for service/maintenance. If I look at the prices now for Merant or Fujitsu, the prices are much higher. I hope the Linux boys are going to provide me a good compiler of the same quality they have for Pascal which works on DOS / Windows and Linux environments. I like that a lot. It will be for free.
4.    UPGRADES
I would like to upgrade my version of my COBOL compiler, but I don't get a offer and I don't see offers on the web. Funny he? A good company should mail their customers sometimes but I am to low for them I am afraid. :-(
5.    FLEXIBILITY (WHAT PLATFORMS OR OPERATING SYSTEMS IN CAN RUN ON)
I work on PC's, mainframes, etc. COBOL is available on all the platforms. ACCU COBOL is even something that works better than JAVA because they support more than 600 platforms running your object which you develop on a pc. Of course it costs a little bit speed but I guess it is much faster than JAVA. CA-REALIA COBOL is more than 3000 times faster than JAVA is what I have seen. That is why I continue to use it until I find something faster. I have so many COBOL lines that I can't afford to change if I wanted to. I don't because COBOL is very easy to maintain and what is called LEGACY is in fact an incredible investment that even gives 'new-conomy' return on investment after 30 years! What is a pitty is that the ANS COBOL boys never invented a standard screen handling that is supported by all COBOL providers in the same way. That should have happened 20 years ago but it is not. Perhaps they will succeed to define something which is as good as the ACCU COBOL people invented.
6.    OBJECT ORIENTED
The modern COBOL definitions contain object oriented stuff. But the most important thing is NOT having an Object oriented compiler but that you develop Object thinking on better a much higher level. Object oriented doesn't mean maintainable. The new OS390 COBOL compiler from IBM contains this new stuff but I don't see much advantage in using it. Better create object-life-cycles on a higher system development level!
7.    QUICK RESULTS
If you start from scratch, COBOL is not a fast development environment. But if you work with it for more than 20 years, you have lots of good sources which are very, very, very reusable so in practise, no 4th generation system was able to push COBOL out of the mainframes. Au contrary: Lots of big businesses are having performance problems because their systems are growing and growing. Do you think an other programming environment is an option? I am sure it is not! They can't buy 3000 times more computers and also IBM is not creating a next generation mainframe which is 3000 times faster than the previous model.
8.    PREFFERED
The press is always talking about something new. A man that bites the dog is in the paper, not the other way around. COBOL is T H E leading programming language on the whole world. Most of the lines are every day written in COBOL. That will not change in the next 20 years. It is perhaps only more times generated or people create fabulous tools like Cornerstone in Holland does. COBOL is the preferred language but the press is not willing to write a lot about it. Pitty, because that is the most important reason why it is difficult to find good programmers. On the schools the students think because of the press that COBOL is old. Pitty. They walk behind some fashion thing. In the beginning of the 80's it was Pascal. After that it was C. Then it should be C++. Now we should use Java. Fashion and nonsense. Sorry to hurt anybody but be serious! Count the amount of programmers. Count the lines. Count the applications. Watch the environments. Watch especially the big financial environments. COBOL! That is wat they speak, read, write, etc.
9.    DEMAND FOR JOB MARKET (PAYS MORE)
There is a bigger demand than there are programmers.
10.    DATABASE INTEGRATION
The integration is always outside. You use a pre-compiler to use SQL or calls to communicate with some other databases. COBOL has also its own indexed files in which you can build your own databases which I did. I developed a general, universal database system in CA-REALIA COBOL for my own systems with the PC as target system.
11.    DIFFICULTY (HOW HARD TO LEARN)
I was a coach for programmers, teaching Jackson Structured Programming and also COBOL, PL1, BASIC, etc. The COBOL course takes 10 days. But to become a professional programmer, we used - depending on what you did before - 22 to 70 days with each day 6 hours very strong learning! After that, you are a commercial programmer, directly usable in for example IBM mainframe environment. Sometimes I have some still some students at my home office. And funny how fast they get a job!
12.    DEMAND IN UNIVERSITIES
I don't know about this.
13.    QUALIFIED TEACHERS
I am one myself but... I don't know how many there are and how good they are.
14.    ALLROUNDER (CAN BE USED GENERALLY)
It depends. The newest compilers like from IBM are very allround. Usually if you are on something like a PC environment, it is nice to have something extra like for example the machine interface from CA-REALIA in which you can do all the technical things you want. But this is not a standard. I create the machine or environment depending things in separate modules.
15.    MAINTAINANCE (EASY TO MAINTAIN?)
It is very, very, very maintainable, much more than any other language. Even people who don't know the language can read it if the programmer uses self-explaining variable names.
16.    PORTABILITY (HOW PORTABLE?)
It is good. ACCU COBOL for example, runs on more than 600 platforms. If there is much system dependend code it is not so portable. If you develop on the PC for the IBM mainframe, CA-REALIA COBOL is very good. I developed many programs on the pc and after one upload of the source and one compile / link, it runs!

If you didn't find out yet, I am very glad using COBOL! All the bad talking about COBOL is because 'they' don't know about it at all! For sure!

I hope you like my answer!
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[Mockers]

Hi Obie,
I'll just state where I am coming from on this. I'm a programmer with 20 years COBOL experience primarily on ICL mainframes on VME and also Microfocus COBOL & Netexpress on WIndows NT.
So to your questions
1. Compiling speed.
Acceptable on mainframes these days - though I do remember the good old days when a compilation could take 20 minutes.
PC COBOL's no real issue - I've done 30,000 line compiles in Microfocus COBOL and Netexpress that take less than a minute.
2. Execution speed.
COBOL's an efficient language. I worked on a project where we were going to migrate programs over to C until we ran a few benchmarks and coverted programs and found the COBOL to be more efficient so stayed with COBOL.
3. Cost
Mainframe costs for COBOL are high. I was surprised how high the costs of products like Netexpress were as well - thousands of pounds. Fujitsu Cobol seemed cheaper.
4. Upgrades.
5. FLEXIBILITY (WHAT PLATFORMS OR OPERATING SYSTEMS IN CAN RUN ON)
COBOL's been around for so long and and is something of a standard for business computing. You can get versions of it for most operating systems that are regarded as the main players (UNIX,Windows,IBM) and there versions that run on OS's that most people will never have heard of. COBOL systems these days are called legacy systems - yet many of these systems are the core applications that keep businesses going. COBOL has its strengths - it is a good language for writing batch systems - it has good file handling mechanisms. It may even have a future - I've been reading recently about using COBOL as a web scripting language on the new Microsoft .NET platform.
6. OBJECT ORIENTED
I've never coded COBOL as OO. Netexpress had OO compatible COBOL but we never had a need to use. I did have a play with Fujitsu's version.
7. QUICK RESULTS
As CROX said if you've had a number of years experience it fairly easy to produce programs fairly quickly especially when you borrowing from existing code, ucing copy libraries etc. Modern environments such as Netexpress provide a development environment similar to those of VB and Delphi thus speeding up development.
8. PREFFERED
Many commercial customers will still use COBOL. I'm still doing new development in COBOL in the year 2000. There is a large skillsbase in the COBOL language - why relearn the wheel if you don't have too. The main reason I'm reskilling is because COBOL has fallen from fashion as CROX says.
9. DEMAND FOR JOB MARKET (PAYS MORE)
I've found that the demand for COBOL programmers has died (especially for VME COBOL). Y2K obviously increased demand temporarily. People are chasing the more fashionable skills (thats why I'm learning Cold Fusion). The pay also seems better in the new fashionable languages. Mind you how many of them will be around in 30 years time. I imagine many of the OLD COBOL systems will still be around.
10. DATABASE INTEGRATION
I've programmed COBOL using the IDMS database system which allows the use of an extended COBOL like syntax (to the CODASYL standard). However compilation was by means of a preprocessor breaking down IDMS code to COBOL calls prior to normal compilation. SQL is called much like other languages again via means of a preprocessor.
11. DIFFICULTY (HOW HARD TO LEARN)
I was sent on a three week COBOL course by my first employees. After this I was thrust into the real world producing production code. This was after being in a non-computing academic background. From this I would state that COBOL is not that difficult a language to program in. Having said that it is very different from many other computing languages. I know people coming from C or Pascal (and Basic) who see COBOL as a very strange beast indeed.

12. DEMAND IN UNIVERSITIES
I would imagine Universities would regard COBOL in disdain. It's almost as if code has to look like algebraic formulae for the academics to consider it as a 'real' language. COBOL is meant to be English like. C++ and C-like languages such as Java, Javascript don't in my mind read as well. There is also some kind of snobbery that if a language is considered easy to use (like VB for example) that the person is not a 'real' programmer.
13. QUALIFIED TEACHERS
14. ALLROUNDER (CAN BE USED GENERALLY)
These days COBOL can be seen as a good all rounder. In PC environments there are environments comparible to those of VB, Delphi and the like with easy to use editors, visual debuggers and RAD features. As far as I can see COBOL has some strengths that the more modern languages don't have. It's a good language for batch processing - the emphasis these days is on interactivity but some applications will always be batch processes (eg billing runs,payroll,mail shots, management reports etc). These applications are often regarded as legacy - but often they are core business applications. I've also had experience of using 4GL's and its suprising how often you go back to COBOL to do some of the tricky bits or to gain a performance improvement.
15. MAINTAINANCE (EASY TO MAINTAIN?)
COBOL can be easy to maintain depending on how well the program has been designed and coded in the first place. Structured programming techniques aid in this, use of common code, calling modules, code annotation and so forth. Maintainability is an issue confronting any language you use. COBOL has the advantage of being a language that was designed to be readable.

16. PORTABILITY (HOW PORTABLE?)
COBOL was designed to a standard and compilers are supposed to meet these. However each COBOL system can have different ways of producing screens for example, differing ways of communicating with the OS and so forth. It would be rare to find a COBOL program of any complexity that would run without some tweaking on differing operating systems. I once worked on a massive system that converted IBM MVS COBOL to run on ICL VME. There was a hefty amount of middleware to do the neccessary code conversion.


Hope this helps
Ian
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[Crox]

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