Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Computer Chronicles - Programming (1984)" video.

  1. 16:37 “Business applications” which nowadays involve access to SQL databases, for example. Which means having good string facilities for dynamically generating SQL statements. Which COBOL is lousy at.
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  2. 09:15 “Data-handling” and “file-manipulating” firmly built around the concepts of fixed-length fields and records, and ISAM files. These days “data-handling” and “file-manipulation” are more descriptive of what you might do in Perl or Python. They mainly involve free-format lines and text-heavy data, where you have to recognize patterns and delimiters rather than count columns.
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  3. But one of the key points about COBOL was its portability between completely different machines from completely different manufacturers. So all that goes out the window once SQL comes in?
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  4. Said standard including no good capabilities for dealing with that standard business requirement called SQL, which was my point.
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  5. The move to SQL happened right through the 1980s. That’s when Oracle became a big corporation, if you remember. And when IBM brought out DB2. Older-style hierarchical and CODASYL databases rapidly became “legacy technology” at that point. As did COBOL, along with them. “you can't just "lift and shift" a COBOL application into an SQL database and expect everything to work” — precisely the point I was making, that COBOL was a poor fit for this new world.
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