Quoting Jaromil (jaromil@???):

> Good post Steve :^) I was reading the GAO report already back in May,
> very interesting. Scaringly enough all rethoric goes bashing what's
> old, a myopic prerogative of the startup-innovation-hype. Very
> surprising to see there is no critical voice in the debate.

This will be a point orthogonal to Steve's about maintaining code
instead of throwing it away and rewriting it without good reason
(CADT-style):

My wife Deirdre, the real programmer in the family, has long observed
that 'Java is COBOL 2.0.' Which is, to be sure, mildly derisive but
also has a serious point at its core: Both COBOL and Java have as
their focus the handling of 'business logic' applications, and in
particular batch processing, as is massively important to the financial
industry. And, if you look past all the language advocacy discussions,
that is one of the places where it's been used quite a bit, for pretty
much exactly the same purposes COBOL was.

This has nothing to do with elegance, good language design, performance,
code quality, the language being crippling / dehumanising / mind-numbing
to coders, whether Scheme / Common LISP, SmallTalk, Haskell, or
something else might have made a better choice, or any of the other
concerns that you or I would want to talk about.

J2EE also made a point of having an enterprise-focussed library to solve
common problems for that application space -early-, which is a big
reason why it grabbed that niche before anything better could have a
chance. Which I'd speculate also probably happened with COBOL back in
dinosaur days.

So, the code in question tends to turn out to be mediocre at best with a
mediocre-at-best toolset, but OTOH at least it generally ends up being
maintainable and mostly works without blowing up the world even when
relying on factory coding shops.

-- 
Cheers,             Grossman's Law:  "In time of crisis, people do not rise to
Rick Moen           the occasion.  They fall to the level of their training."
rick@???          http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#grossman
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