Re:Oracle and the fall of Java EE
by acdha on Friday July 08, 2016 @11:03AM
(#12056006)
> Enterprises dislike unnecessary change, so they wouldn't abandon java even if there was a technically more suitable alternative - they stuck with COBOL long after C was established
This isn't a great comparison because C was, and still is, a much lower-level language than COBOL. If you're looking at that from the perspective of a large organization with millions of lines of code, it's hard to justify the claim that C is “technically more suitable”, because the things C does better are largely irrelevant to business apps while the ISO standard for COBOL includes a ton of higher-level features like an indexed database, first-class support for fixed-precision math (a hard requirement for financial apps), a form library, object orientation, etc. which would need to be maintained as library dependencies in C. Any COBOL programmer would be familiar those but each C developer would need to get used to each application's particular selection of libraries.
A better comparison would something like Java or .Net which both have standard answers for most of those questions and, perhaps unsurprisingly, were quickly adopted by companies trying to move new development away from COBOL. As far back as the mid-90s, a popular approach was to move the front-end into Java (or, later, a web app) and start chipping away at the decades of backend COBOL code running on a big central server.
This isn't a great comparison because C was, and still is, a much lower-level language than COBOL. If you're looking at that from the perspective of a large organization with millions of lines of code, it's hard to justify the claim that C is “technically more suitable”, because the things C does better are largely irrelevant to business apps while the ISO standard for COBOL includes a ton of higher-level features like an indexed database, first-class support for fixed-precision math (a hard requirement for financial apps), a form library, object orientation, etc. which would need to be maintained as library dependencies in C. Any COBOL programmer would be familiar those but each C developer would need to get used to each application's particular selection of libraries.
A better comparison would something like Java or .Net which both have standard answers for most of those questions and, perhaps unsurprisingly, were quickly adopted by companies trying to move new development away from COBOL. As far back as the mid-90s, a popular approach was to move the front-end into Java (or, later, a web app) and start chipping away at the decades of backend COBOL code running on a big central server.