http://www.objectz.com/cobolreport/TCR_ayourdon.htm

Click here

-- jj (s@g.n), December 26, 1999

Answers

Also see this thread:

"New Y2K Essay"

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0026a1

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), December 26, 1999.

This rant (the COBOL report) is not addressed at Ed's latest essay - it is a response to The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. It is old news and has been posted here before.

I think Ed's predictions have shown the test of time as well as any other predictions in this unpredictable world. The COBOL report was forcasting the use of COBOL in web applications - I am still waiting for that.

-- kermit (colourmegreen@hotmail.com), December 26, 1999.

And the big y2k money for COBOL programmers so confidently anticipated here never did materialize. It's now estimated that only 7% of organizations hired outside programming help of any kind.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 26, 1999.

And of course, to Flint who sees this as "good" news, this means that the level of effort was overestimated, not that the work didn't get done.

Flint, rule #1 in software: level of effort is almost never overestimated.

-- a (a@a.a), December 27, 1999.

'a':

I regard this as indefinite, ambiguous. My suspicion is that COBOL programmers were hoping for high prices, but it's not like we had warehouses full of idle COBOL programmers to bid on. And apparently stealing each others' programmers wasn't seen as productive (and it wouldn't have been, since familiarity with the code base is important).

I don't know if the task was overestimated (seems unlikely), or whether in-house resources were sufficient. There have been some indications that other non-remediation projects have taken a harder hit than expected, as an unexpectedly high allocation of IT resources needed to get diverted to remediation. And of course, there's plenty of indication that the job didn't get finished in a lot of places.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 27, 1999.