Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe
by fmora on Monday August 02, 2010 @12:15PM
(#1568024)
You have to remember that they use these systems to run their business and they've been tested for thousands or millions of hours so the system is extremely reliable. It is naive to suggest to switch to a newer platform or language. Those things are always changing. Also, once you are a seasoned software developer in multiple languages how long do you really think it will take you to learn cobol? Not much I can assure you. You'll probably be familiar with the basics in a couple of days, and maybe even enough to be dangerous. Switching to a platform just for the sake of switching is extremely dangerous and potentially quite costly. Especially when from the customers point of view it really makes no difference whether behind the scenes the business is using cobol, fortran, java, ruby or whatever new fad of the day. If the system is going to behave exactly the same whether you use java or cobol then what is the point of switching?
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Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe
by jacquesm on Monday August 02, 2010 @04:07PM
(#1568865)
A million hours is more than a century, I think that is somewhat unlikely.
Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe
by fmora on Monday August 02, 2010 @06:12PM
(#1569299)
No is not. Thousands if not millions of people use their systems every year. Every person that uses it counts as time testing the system. Notice how quickly the hours add up if you look at it this way.
Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe
by jacquesm on Monday August 02, 2010 @10:26PM
(#1569884)
Ok, I was thinking in terms of the run-time of the software, not in terms of the time people spent using the system. But that's a valid way to look at it.
Re:Western civilization runs on the mainframe
by whatusername on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @01:17AM
(#1570208)
You could say the same about Windows XP.