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Author: Brian Nash
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] Politics of IT in the U.S. government
I guess I'm learning COBOL then!

C11 is a little too abstract anyway. (at least, GCC makes it abstract)

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 02:41:29PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
>
>Politics of IT in the U.S. government
>
>http://www.itworld.com/article/3103585/government-it/politics-blamed-for-feds-reliance-on-old-it.html
>
>Hi all,
>
>In the preceding article, put away all the politics: That's not the
>subject of my email.
>
>At first I almost vomited when reading this sentence:
>
>================================================
>The Social Security Administration, for instance, has more than 60
>million lines of Cobol,
>================================================
>
>My first thought: Cobol? Are you kidding? I thought I'd gotten done
>with that in 1985!
>
>And then a part of my mind said "sysvinit? Are you kidding? Etc.
>
>So I started thinking about it. Except for the lack of local variables
>(and this is a huge lack, in my opinion), Cobol was a pretty decent
>language. When it came to letters and numbers and data, it got the job
>done. For its time, it was pretty portable: You just changed the
>Environment Division. And it wasn't tough to learn or write, always
>assuming you were a fast, prolific touch typist.


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