Re: Cobol work?

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:03:40 -0500, "Judson McClendon" <judmc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>"Richard" <riplin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Legibility is entirely what one is used to. ...


Not necessarily. A lot of it was the culture of the code shops.

COBOL shops emphasized documentation in code and controls because this code was
controlling/directing big money throughout the corporation. And that people
were going to have to maintain and modify the code was usually understood from
the very beginning. And undocumented code took longer to fix/modify and
therefore wasted the business's money. Its roots are in business processes.

C and C++ and its syntactical cousins originated in research labs and grad
student programs where code elegance and sparseness were emphasized. And if the
code had some cute function that wasn't obvious then that was better still in
the contest of "who is the most skilled programmer". This resulted in a bias
against documentation as it was against the unwritten standard - that if you
need documentation to understand it then you don't measure up, and putting
documentation in was an insult against good coders.

JJ

>
>Not entirely! To a large degree, yes. Not all languages are equally
>assimilable by the human mind. You can prove this easily with a simple
>thought experiment: Imagine a language where each word contains at least 20
>letters and a dozen syllables. And it has been proven that humans do better
>with letter based languages than with pictogram type languages, which were
>abandoned by everybody but Asians long ago. Some indication of this
>particular aptitude of the brain for lettered languages can be seen in that
>the following can be fairly easily read:
>
>-----------------------------
>I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
>phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde
>Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the
>olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit
>pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a
>porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
>istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas thought
>slpeling was ipmorantt !!!! (evne befro slpel ckech)
>-----------------------------

James Johnson
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