COBOL on Wheelchair | Hacker News Reader

COBOL on Wheelchair

azac.pl

100 pointstartle40 comments

I'm usually not one to get offended and and I'm not going to say the author is horrible person like some jerks around here that get offended by non-PC stuff, but it comes across as possibly a tad offensive to use a wheelchair as a jab at Ruby on Rails. I know it's a play on Cobol being old, but a lot of people confined to wheel chairs are young, in the prime of their life and extremely capable in other areas of their areas of expertise. Anyways, I leave it to the author to think whether or not this has merit, because it's not really my place to judge since I'm not in a wheelchair myself.

TBH I was expecting this to be about someone actually hacking on the cobol that runs their wheelchair.

> it's not really my place to judge since I'm not in a wheelchair myself

Yet you do a sterling job of not letting that hold you back for an instant.

It is possible to perceive something as likely to offend many without being offended yourself. I'm neither judging, nor offended, but simply stating that the choice of diction here is likely to be hurtful to others. It is not necessarily judgement to speculate on likely outcomes from actions and words.

That being said it is my place to judge you as a pedantic troll that lowers the quality of the discourse here. Furthermore, it is the place of everyone else to judge this comment of mine as one deserving of downvotes since my previous sentence makes it as useless to everyone here as your statement.

I don't think it's a case of passing judgement, but of an expression of discomfort around how the source is presented.

Like some jokes from a few decades ago, there is still value (they can be/are humorous) but at the same time the re-telling of the joke today would need to be done with some tact.

I presume you are aware of the old adage that every time you see a statement of the form "I'm not X, but Y", you can save yourself time by just ignoring everything before the "but"...

> offensive to use a wheelchair as a jab at Ruby on Rails

Fortress on Freeway, Clojure on clouds.

See also (as noted elsewhere): COBOL on Cogs http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

And INTERCAL on Interstates http://www.intercaloninterstates.org/

> I know it's a play on Cobol being old

err... just from reading the title, I assumed it was a play on cobol being disadvantaged, but being old would also imply being disadvantaged physically. metaphorically speaking it makes perfect sense on first read... You seem to be using eval() on human language

If one spent enough time, they could even find "Ruby on Rails" offensive, in some misconstrued way as the word "rails" can be derived as conformist and against free thinking as one is confined to "rails." I don't think it's any of that, but just alluding that spend enough time dissecting anything and someone is bound to find issue with it.

I think the overall gist is that we developers are not always marketing people, so we spend more time on making whatever it is and less on the name. Naming things is a hassle, especially when you have no intention on making it a marketable product.

I recently wrote about a way for developers to find "good enough" names in a short period of time.

http://blog.plague-dev.de/an-algorithmic-name-finding-proces...

It works for me and my colleagues pretty well. You could give it a try if you want.

Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out.

I thought on rails was referring to a category of first a person shooters http://www.giantbomb.com/on-rails/3015-169/

Though I get the name, I wish it was named something other "on wheelchair". It feels a little degrading. Other than this, it's a nice conceptual work.

Degrading in what sense? For Cobol or for wheelchair users?

Cobol for Cripples?

How about cobol on crutches

Oh damn, the aspirations of COBOL on Cogs are now a reality?

I call shotgun on "Why You Should Use COBOL on Wheelchair Instead of Ruby on Rails For Your Startup".

Introducing the CRAP (COBOL-RPG-Apache-PL/SQL) stack. Consulting available and a book on the way.

Make a CRUD app with CRAP!

I thought that was PHP's sales pitch. Zing!

Don't be silly. PHP's sales pitch is "at least it's not Perl."

Perl's pitch, meanwhile, has lately been "at least it's not PHP."

I know who's winning that fight, in terms of share, but I'm not sure who I think more deserves to lose it.

If it is web scale and helps me pivot faster, I'm all for it.

This was both humorous and interesting. The people complaining about the wheelchair aspect need to stop and think about their own projections around the word "wheelchair".

I don't like it because the lack of alliteration makes it a less catchy name.

I reckon it's the real reason responsible for Ruby on Rails recognition.

"The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.

The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.

Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it."

but very nice graphics )

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it

This was my motto until i did a year or so consulting in RPG-III.

I have to wonder: there are very competent "old technology/mainframe" programmers. They debugged complex programs using very primitive tools when we were all in diapers. Obviously, there are also very mediocre old programmers, but for the sake of this discussion, consider the best practitioners of their generation.

How is it that they mostly find themselves stuck in horrible jobs, maintaining legacy software on their old platforms? Surely, for a programmer with experience in assembly and Basic (as an example), becoming proficient in most modern languages shouldn't be a problem. But I strongly suspect that even the minority of the old programmers who bother learning a new language, can't find employment utilizing their new knowledge. Any thoughts?

Lots of these guys learned new languages like C aeons ago and have since moved to Java, Scala, Python, etc. The folks who are stuck maintaining legacy COBOL apps are there because they want to be there. The very competent people quickly learn how to use new tools, but can still deep dive and find bugs related to memory leaks and race conditions when it is needed. At the same time, these old guys are likely to demand that everyone around them use TDD so that they don't introduce that kind of bug in the first place. Case in point, Uncle Bob.

Cobol and some of the Basics had a characteristics that made them very desirable for certain use cases. Namely, static memory allocation. Although you can dynamically allocate memory in Cobol, you generaly don't. All storage is statically allocated at program startup. This would be highly desirable if you wanted to allow third parties to execute arbitrary code on your server. That plus no recursive function calls ensures stack and heap safety.

Beats the hell out of DOS on Dope http://dod.codeplex.com

I should put up a repo for my "QBASIC Gone Quixotic" project.

Love the logo & name.

Whatever the downsides are, I'm guessing memory leaks aren't among them :-)

(given that the DATA DIVISION is fixed size, unless there are significant GNU extensions)

The logo was done in the font Glass Tty VT220 -- which, fyi, also makes a very nice terminal font for your command line. (In fact, I have yet to see anything that matches it.)

The fact is COBOL is still used, and useful today, all these decades later. I wonder what the sentiment about Ruby on Fails will be in thirty years time, and I don't think we will still be using it.

The 2 program samples in Cobol and Html shown together made me realize just how verbose Html really is, which makes me think we will still be using Html in 30 yrs time.

Ruby will still be used years from now. Rails, probably not, but Ruby is a good language in its domain (scripting, dynamic languages).

I'm pretty new to Ruby and I'm already sick of people equating Ruby and Rails though I understand how it happens.

I'm waiting for FORTRAN on Steam Engine.

Not a microframework, but a friend of mine committed this: http://freecode.com/projects/cgi77

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