Built to Last

Notes

When scores of COBOL programmers rushed to offer their services, the state governments blaming COBOL didn’t accept the help. In fact, it turned out the states didn’t really need it

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“It was certainly intended (and expected) that the language could be used by novice programmers and read by management.”

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Because it was designed not just to be written but also to be read, COBOL would make computerized business processes more legible, both for the original programmers and managers and for those who maintained these systems long afterwards.

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COBOL has been derided by many within the computer science field as a weak or simplistic language.

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culture and gender dynamics of early computer programming

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perceived COBOL as inferior and unattractive, in part because it did not require abstruse knowledge

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new practitioners tried to prove their worth and professionalize what had been seen until the 1960s as rote, unintellectual, feminized work. Consciously or not, the last thing many male computer scientists entering the �eld wanted was to make the �eld easier

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good COBOL was great long-term infrastructure, because it was so transparent

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accessibility is one of the reasons that COBOL was denigrated

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originally designed by committee for big, unglamorous, infrastructural business systems

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if your code is easy to understand, maybe you and your skills aren’t all that unique or valuable. If management thinks the tools you use and the code you write could be easily learned by anyone, you are eminently replaceable.

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protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers

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it was the website through which people filed claims, written in the comparatively much newer programming language Java, that was responsible for the errors, breakdowns, and slowdowns. The backend system that processed those claims—the one written in COBOL—hadn’t been to blame at all.

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It’s a common �ction that computing technologies tend to become obsolete in a matter of years or even months, because this sells more units of consumer electronics. But this has never been true when it comes to large-scale computing infrastructure.

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despite the age of COBOL systems, when the crisis hit, COBOL trundled along, remarkably stable.

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Older systems have value, and constantly building new technological systems for short-term pro�t at the expense of existing infrastructure is not progress. In fact, it is among the most regressive paths a society can take.

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doing the mundane, plodding work of caring for and �xing the systems we all rely on

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