Imagine that your grocery store is 5 miles away. Every day you walk to the store because you can't afford a bike or a car. Because you walk, you can only buy a day's worth of food and your forced to waste a lot of time every day walking. One day, someone offers to sell you a car for the cost of a months's worth of groceries. Do you do it? Not if you want to feed your family, even if the car is a better choice.
COBOL vs. Perl is walking vs. driving. At my last job, management (but not the programmers) knew that COBOL was not the best choice. But the cost of switching was so prohibitively high. The programmers must be retrained, licenses for the new languages may be necessary, the old system needs to be analyzed and determine what is necessary for the new system (many systems contained hundreds, if not thousands of jobs, thus making this incredibly expensive). Further, all systems that connect to yours need to be analyzed. Then, after all of this is done, starts the process of designing, getting approvals, coding, testing, debugging, getting sign offs, implementing, and then fixing everything you missed. And remember: either you've retrained COBOL programmers to do this, in which case they're newbies in the new language (Yikes!), or you've hired a new staff which doesn't know the system (Yikes!).
Continued in a reply, because I was cut off.
In reply to RE: Intended use and unintended use. An insight into design.
by Ovid
in thread Intended use and unintended use. An insight into design.
by JanneVee
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