P
Peter E.C. Dashwood
Paul,
I think you may be missing the fact that these are projects that are using
SourceForge products or are connected with SourceForge in some way.
While I support SourceForge in general, and Open COBOL in particular, the
SourceForge COBOL product is not yet robust enough for serious commercial
deployment (at least as far as I'm concerned; others may differ...).
Obviously, this perception, if it is shared by others would have an effect
on the number of projects using it that are reported on the link you posted.
It is very wrong to draw the conclusion that no COBOL (or PASCAL)
development is going on, based on this one set of statistics. I personally
know of three COBOL development projects happening at the moment.
Having said that, it would be foolish to pretend that the language is not in
decline, but I believe ALL procedural languages (not just COBOL) have a
lifetime of not more than around 15 years. (Hope I'm wrong...).
This is because it is becoming uneconomic and non-viable for companies to
maintain multi-lingual, multi-skilled IT departments. It is cheaper to
simply go the package route or outsource the whole function. I see a time
coming when "IT" will simply mean "Network support and maintenance" and in
house "programmming" will be done by end users, using standard tools that
will be smarter than those available today.
Pete.
(Top post...no more...)
I think you may be missing the fact that these are projects that are using
SourceForge products or are connected with SourceForge in some way.
While I support SourceForge in general, and Open COBOL in particular, the
SourceForge COBOL product is not yet robust enough for serious commercial
deployment (at least as far as I'm concerned; others may differ...).
Obviously, this perception, if it is shared by others would have an effect
on the number of projects using it that are reported on the link you posted.
It is very wrong to draw the conclusion that no COBOL (or PASCAL)
development is going on, based on this one set of statistics. I personally
know of three COBOL development projects happening at the moment.
Having said that, it would be foolish to pretend that the language is not in
decline, but I believe ALL procedural languages (not just COBOL) have a
lifetime of not more than around 15 years. (Hope I'm wrong...).
This is because it is becoming uneconomic and non-viable for companies to
maintain multi-lingual, multi-skilled IT departments. It is cheaper to
simply go the package route or outsource the whole function. I see a time
coming when "IT" will simply mean "Network support and maintenance" and in
house "programmming" will be done by end users, using standard tools that
will be smarter than those available today.
Pete.
(Top post...no more...)