The adventure continues... see previous Blog entries for context!.
Been readings some introductory pages to books with such titles as "OOP De-mystified", "Dummies Guide to Ruby on Rails" and "Ruby by Example - concepts and code" and "Ruby on Rails Bible" (talk about try to get religion into EVERYTHING!!) - I get objects, I get classes, I get attributes and methods - ALL GOOD - then I find a page that I read half-way and fall asleep!! I go back and try to re-read it three or four times and each time I fall asleep - thanks to these books, the bags under my eyes are rapidly disappearing... but I am no closer to climbing "my mountain" - the metaphorical one.. you know.... Then I keep harking back in my mind to the statistic that according to GARTNER (world MAVENs on everything IT) 80% of the worlds computer software in production is COBOL - how is that for a nifty little statistic.. and get this - every year 5 BILLION new lines of COBOL code are added to the world's COBOL production systems!! - who is writing and maintaining this stuff - I haven't PLACED a COBOL programmer in almost 20 years!!
So, the bottom line is for me - every time the going gets impenetrable, I fantasize that there must be a version of COBOL that is OBJECT ORIENTED and just PERFECT for writing heavy-duty, state-of-the-art web applications...then i go to GOOGLE, enter in the word COBOL and pray that there will be a search result that says - NEW COBOL 2002 - FREE COMPILER - perfect for writing dynamic web applications ... but ALAS - no such result pops up... what I did find this evening though was this little "gem" from computer scientist E Dijkstra. I didn't know whether to fall about laughing or try to understand his point .. but here is the link anyhow* - his short article is called "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" written in 1975 it seems
The beginning of his article starts off bysaying;
"Sometimes we discover unpleasant truths. Whenever we do so, we are in difficulties: suppressing them is scientifically dishonest, so we must tell them, but telling them, however, will fire back on us. If the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary, foolishly gullible or what have you. (Besides that, telling such truths is a sure way of making oneself unpopular in many circles, and, as such, it is an act that, in general, is not without personal risks. Vide Galileo Galilei.....)"
A couple of the statements in his short musing are as follows;
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums."
Anyone with even moderate interest in IT , languages, evolution and history of IT, will find his article very interesting.
OK back to the book "OOP De-Mystified"
Another VERY interesting article - "CONFESSIONS OF A COBOL PROGRAMMER"
