I never thought I would defend Cobol but I have found that Greenscreen terminal based programs written in Cobol and Powerhouse are amazingly fast compared to equivalent web based applications. (I speak from my experience in Financial industry. your experience may vary). Scalability is a mater of throwing more IBM hardware at it and its not very expensive to operate. The IBM Iseries is something unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of scalability. Just saying that your new fancy language of choice is not necessarily better than Cobol.
Robert Glass wrote a series of articles defending Cobol as still the best language in some ways for business programming. He didn't talk about performance, IIRC, rather about language expressiveness (mainly language constructs for writing reports). But what you're saying is not surprising. The disease of our industry is the notion that old stuff is icky and stupid.
Edit: I hate Java as much as the next guy, but this thread is missing the article's interesting point, which is that the real legacy technology is the mainframes which still power the large-scale economy. Shouldn't we consider why? Isn't it meaningful that the technologies we prefer haven't yielded anything capable of disrupting these entrenched systems?
> COBOL is a language designed in an era where syntax was thought to be the difficult part of programming.
This is a very striking comment and one that reshapes my criticism of languages in general. Often one says that COBOL "feels old" but it's difficult to pinpoint why; I think your comment gets to the heart of the matter and explains why languages such as lisp or smalltalk retain influence today. The problem they attempt to tackle is still difficult in modern programming environments, but the problem COBOL was designed to remedy has paled in comparison. Thus, it's similar to how AOL used to be the main method people used to access the internet -- e-mail, IRC, and the general web was difficult enough for a novice to master that a service like AOL was needed. Now the web has matured enough that the problem AOL was trying to solve has disappeared -- leaving it outdated by substance rather than outdated by style.
