Benedict Non-Profit. In the assessment process with Keller Schroeder, I became aware of their unique ability to assess our needs.
I have a great appreciation for their leadership, for their professionalism, and for their attention to every detail. I think one of the reasons we have stayed with Keller Schroeder over the years is that we have this continuity of service from start to finish; they are with us from cradle to grave. We look forward to working with Keller Schroeder as always.
They have been great to work with. Keller Schroeder has been nothing but top-notch. In general, they are great guys and have been very professional and personable. They represented Keller Schroeder well. They take it personal reacting just defending what they did, instead of learning better ways to do their job. I designed with a good programmer who was open what now is called workflow, that emerged from what I knew about Petri nets and the need to automate processes.
We build a prototype but that project was canceled and later I saw a system based on our prototype developed by an external company owned by a friend of one of the managers who voted against our project. With just what comes in no more than 10 pages of the famous wizard book, that we discussed very enthusiastically he wrote a COBOL program generator, the managers how felt that we were a danger for their position we were not because our boss wanted to open a new department told our boss that we were discussing all the time and separate us in other jobs.
But that is not an isolated story, many programmers feel that a way to keep their job is to be the only guy who understands his programs. There are many unmoral people everywhere. Is a fact of life, so I always try to avoid such environments. Had they first documented the program, then everybody, including them, could be able to understand and maintain each program in the system.
COBOL, the older more verbose an limited versions, encourage bad programming habits, that some people thought that OOP was the panacea to solve them. Just browse any open source repository and the majority of the development has the same problems that legacy code, mainly the lack of documentation. Many of those programs were written by experts in some domain for example medical imaging who learned a language, for example Python, but the code hard to read and of course not reliable.
If you say, hey your program seems fantastic but has a lot of bugs, you could improve your system if you do this and that. The most part of the time they will react furiously defensive.
Before you tell me that there are many development methodologies and now the programmers know about them, many of those methodologies are more marketing because they lack a solid formal background and are not real helpers in software development.
I refer to the widespread methodologies that say what qualities are important in software but say nothing on how to achieve it. I really enjoyed Ada and even got to meet Jean Ichbiah. Ada programs on a VAX computer always ran if you could get them to compile. It might not do what you wanted, but it would run. The problem I had with Ada something I mentioned to Mr. Ichbiah was that it could not do fixed-point math. All math was floating-point.
Even with bit floating-point, most computers are off by a penny after only 1, iterations. Not good enough for banking. The bit NCR minicomputer could produce the correct answer after 1,, iterations. I currently use Java because it is quick and easy. Java lets me connect to any web site and collect financial data with reasonable accuracy. Do you remember the switch variable?
Some programmers hated it and others loved it. For instance a person in a database was listed as a widower. This caused a problem because the Married condition was satisfied first. The wife appeared to be alive as far the computer was concerned. This could cause higher insurance rate or an extra tax credit. In the old days space was tight all the logical values were stored together to save space.
This was probably repaired by changing the order of testing switch values. The inline perform which code like a for next loop instead of in a separate block is another one. Talking about bad constructs C allows you declare a variable in a for loop or putting more than one statement on a single line. From a debugging standpoint these are bad practices. I also wondered about the recession around when the real estate market fell. Many companies and governments downsized and many programmers lost their jobs.
I have been a member of the Bcs for more than 50 years. It is pointless comparing these to modern languages. The main point is that some of this software is still running. A testament to these languages. I have noticed that the languages evolve as required. Many modern languages are certainly far more suited for these fields of applications.
Because of better way to abstract concepts, reuse code and isolate behavior, to name just a few topics.
Because no one invested in modernizing legacy systems. Actually, this non-investments might have been perfect business decision in terms of the cost vs. Certainly not. Is it better for actuarial computations? Excellent article. I had to learn new fangled object oriented programming and relational databases took the place of flat files…great stuff! Talk about an unreadable programming language. It ran, it was fast, gave the same answers, but I understood the code only laboriously—reading a single symbol at a time—5 minutes after he explained it to me.
APL is a cousin of C, btw. The main sin of Kenneth Iverson was to use a special too cryptic notation, even with an special character set. I agree that APL has an obscure notation but the idea to program with algebra in mind was great.
That brings back memories. This article brought back lots of memories. I remember, there used to be one-off requests to do some data updates as there was some issue in production. Till date I consider this as my most satisfactory accomplishment at work. It was ancient and unlovable even then, and now it is even more so. A developer would have to very desperate indeed to retrain themselves in such an obsolete language. Short-term you may make some good money, but long-term it is a total dead end.
I learnt COBOL in the 80s as part of my university degree and my final year project involved myself and three others documenting the hundreds of undocumented COBOL programs of a major mining company. Companies needed a lot more programmers back then, and this was one way to get more people to program.
I see no reason for saying that companies needed a lot more programmers back then. There is abundant reason to say that back then at the time of the earliest programming languages the need for a non-cryptic language was recognized. Most other languages use symbols for many things instead of words. Symbols make the code more compact but not as easy to understand until the symbols are learned. Both have advantages and disadvantages. It was something of a legal scam.
They were receiving government funding, because there was a national shortage of programmers in Canada, and one large corporation benefited. Yes, it happens in Canada too that taxpayer money ends up diverted into the coffers of the wealthy. The podcasters reveal that New Jersey is in desperate need of COBOL programmers, because its unemployment assistance system runs on that language. This appalls me, but I get it. The heartless, like Trump and its cronies, are rewarded with outrageous wealth, while people with functioning hearts are expected to put in their time and effort for FREE.
That snap of the coding card gave me the willies. My final program happened to be a dating service based on input parameters. I saw the creator of match.
She sold match. I would love to help if there is a need. COBOL, the planet where an almost imperceptible dot at the end of a long line makes the difference between success and catastrophe. Will they pay me enough to get out of bed and code? Dad worked for them until they were no longer Control Data.
He fixed the mainframes that CDC produced. What a flashback! Goddam…another revenue stream for old school programmers! The original version of Visual Basic not. Net VB is not a good language but got a lot of use. That makes it less compact. It uses words instead of symbols.
That feature has advantages and disadvantages. COBOL has been improved. Well note that there is nowhere in their website that says they need programmers. I do not mean physically; they can process a COBOL program and understand what the program is doing and generate a completely new program that looks very different. IBM wrote one about a quarter century ago and I know there is a competitor that had one too. I am sure that there are also language conversion programs.
Also about a quarter century ago I wrote a program in COBOL that parsed manufacturing instructions written by engineers for use by engineers; people, not the computer. It parsed out tools and materials so they can be put into another program for use by the computer.
Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler ever of any language and was very involved in the design and development of COBOL. I met her but at the time I did not know how important she was. I even stumbled into her office once in the basement of the Pentagon but she was not there. I really regret not asking her for work; I am sure she would have had some fantastic work for me. Tha kind of tools are, among other things, what is needed to do what in the s was called revers engineering, to analyze undocumented code to understand what it does.
For example from a loop you can infer for every record in file X do this and that, and so on. Yes, a Caravel converted application separates User Interface components from application behavior. It also separates the application data access to the final data storage. As a result of this:. The integration is very simple due to the conversion process that includes an application structure with an architecture fully adapted towards its integration with an application server.
Caravel migrates towards the most commonly used RDBMs on the market. The security aspects are is not part of a migration. Once the application has been migrated to the new environment, is necessary to execute a Security Management Application for that platform Operating system, Data base management system, etc. The personalization of the interface works as follows: When translating an application, you can choose between having the user interface automatically generated or personalizing single screens according to the preferences of the customer.
In the first case, the way the screens will look is based on certain transformation rules that Caravel provides and that allow to generate the equivalent HTML code for each field of the screen. The result will be an HTML code that generates the same fields, sizes and positions as the original. The color attributes, sources, background color, etc. In the second case, the customer can create a JSP template for each screen that he wishes to personalize.
This template can have any aspect and does not have to be similar to the original. Caravel also supplies the JavaScript functions in order to manage those fields and send the information back to the application for example function keys. This solution provides all the flexibility for the designer to get the desired aspect. These two solutions are not incompatible; it is possible to personalize only some screens of the application.
This process can be progressive or according to the customer's needs. The application will search for the personalized screen first and then, if it cannot find it, dynamically will create a screen in accordance with the parameters of the selected user interface. The personalization process can be carried out completely by the customer or could be part of the project. In this last case, the customer can define the rules, standards and styles that he would desire.
Since the aspect of the application is defined by a group of JSP templates, the customer can change any graphical element at any time. In the Caravel Standard Questionnaire are reflected all the variables that can determine the complexity of a conversion project.
Before start the project, BASE will evaluate the complexity and therefore, the resources, time and costs of each project. This estimation is based in a big number of migration projects already completed successfully. These projects cover a great diversity of sizes, architectures and specific legacy technologies. Yes, by default, your migrated applications will look like batch applications to the iSeries, using ZERO interactive resources.
If the original application is multi-language, Caravel will migrate it with same functionalities. If the original is not multi-language, during the translation process, Caravel can be configured to extract the literals inherent to language and exports those to an external file. By editing and translating that file, you easily convert your application to a multi-language one.
Yes, a complete and detailed analysis report is generated in the first conversion phase. Caravel includes a specific tool Caravel Insight which does a complete inventory of all the legacy system components and analyses completeness, relationships, dependences, errors, etc.
The converted Java application has no limitations concerning future programming or connectivity. We have vast experience in this field. Typically it is necessary to connect the new Java applications with previous developments made by that customer. Usually every conversion project includes a part of integration with other existing or future systems.
Caravel is not merely a screen transformation or a middleware. Our service is a project to go to Java at once. Our service migrates the whole application to Java, then analyses it, structures it into components and improves the application with our technical reengineering technology. Our approach is much wider than an interface make-up with some Internet connectivity provided by the mentioned products.
Must be underlined, that the duration time can be similar or ever reduced with Caravel. Both languages have remained staples of business programming worldwide and they are joined in this tier by C.
Over several decades since the inception of business computing there are companies which today still survive on their ancient RPG and COBOL applications. Migrating applications and data is the most obvious alternative for companies who are tied to the platform. There are a few other options for companies looking to leave the platform including rewriting the business logic of their applications or abandoning the platform outright.
These alternatives are often costly affairs, which require years to rewrite business critical applications with no guarantee of success. As RPG has continued its decline in popularity other languages have risen to prominence. By maintaining their codebase in a popular language, employers can be assured that their mission critical applications are well supported by their staff. COBOL ranks 21, likely a result of its continued usage in mainframe.
The most popular languages are also the most stable languages; C for example has remained a contender in the top 3 for over three decades. It is of critical importance to companies who require secure and workable applications to have a codebase which is maintainable going forward.
Without this subsidy, the cost of the POWER chip is expected to skyrocket in order to meet production costs.
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