Re: Productivity
- From: LX-i <lxi0007@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 11:30:51 -0600
Pete Dashwood wrote:
But despite all of that, it is quite obvious that my productivity in Visual Studio 2005 is MUCH better than my productivity using the Fujitsu IDE.
This impressed me when I first started working with VB6 many years ago. What I found especially useful was that it syntax-checked each line as you typed it. I wrote a VB program to parse our DMS schema and compute card columns. I looked at it a few years ago, when I already had some years of VB experience under my belt - it was horrendous! But, it was syntactically correct.
A little over a year ago (or has it been 2 now - wow!), I used it to strip the data items and create relational tables. Now, the code is much tighter - and to calculate the total size of an OCCURS clause, I just read ahead in the dataset to get all the PIC sizes, and multiply by the number of times.
This made me think about tools.
VS 2005 provides an Interactive Development Environment that is simply years ahead of any other development environment I have ever worked in (on both mainframes and PCs).
Colour coding of code, rollaway windows that you can pin down when you want them or send to a tab when you don't, intuitive context sensitive tooltips, having all your defined variables available for selection at the moment you want to reference them, having all methods, events and properties for the object you are referencing available as you type, along with help tooltips for any you select, ...all of these things collectively add up to MAJOR productivity improvements.
SlickEdit (formerly "Visual SlickEdit") does many of these things for COBOL, although not to the extent that VS2005 does for C#. Our productivity shot through the roof when we began using it for our COBOL code development. It will pop up a list of variable defined in working storage, has context-sensitive help, and even has a window that will show you the definition of whatever variable the cursor is on. (All this assumes you have the thing configured correctly - it will build "tag lists" for the COBOL COPY libraries, for example, but you have to do that for the feature to work.)
It's a little pricey, IMO, for an editor ($200 last I checked), but of course, the US taxpayers provide us our copies. :)
Back in 2002, I was out at Oracle in Silicon Valley, at a week-long "hey, pick us!" pitch they were giving the USAF. Some of the folks there were from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie-Mellon University. One of the ladies there saw it open on my laptop and said "Hey, is that Visual SlickEdit?" I told her that it was, and she said, "we use that all the time for our Java! I never would have thought to use it for COBOL." I thought that was kind of funny because, at the time, I had never thought of using it for Java.
But.most importantly of all, the environment is NOT focused on code development. It is pure event driven programming. You DON'T start by writing IDENTIFICATION DIVISION (or its equivalent). You design what you want and the code for the events is placed into the right contexts for you. All of the housekeeping, fixed context, and overhead is hidden (unless you WANT to see it). You focus totally on your application and what you want to happen when events occur in it.
I don't really have a good comparison here, because our COBOL is based on the Unisys mainframe. I do know that there are tools that really integrate Windows with it (such as the ability to map drives to mainframe program files, interactive debug execute on the mainframe from the PC). Of course, none of them have been approved for use. (Don't get me started on that...)
So, it looks like I will be winding down my COBOL development.
The tools for cutting edge development are MUCH better and cheaper than COBOL. It remains useful for batch development, which is what it was invented for, and where we came in...
And what it's still used for in our environment. We're seeing thousands of batch jobs run per day - in fact, we recently had to change the way we handled these runs, because the users were literally bringing the system to its knees. (Have you ever seen a mainframe beg? It ain't pretty...) Now, we have a controller, and we're actually clearing more runs than we did with the old way, because we're controlling the number that are started.
That's the one thing that I'm not sure about - there still is a need for innovation within the COBOL community. There are processes that are crucial for businesses and governments that cannot be replaced immediately, but could be improved. What happens to these apps as the IT world "moves on"? I don't see improvements - in our arena, every system we interface with has had big problems with a fraction of the transaction volume that we clear on a slow day. There was one recently that went to 30-plus second response times when they got 4 users! Then, you deal with all these policies and things that you have to deal with to be "compliant," and they all seem to suck bandwidth and performance. Sure, if you're running on a huge box, it'll be passable - but are the network folks giving us funds to upgrade our hardware? Heh.
For good or bad, the above won't be my concern for the system on which I've worked for the past 9 years. In a way, I hate that, because I have so many other ideas that I know would improve the system with minimal investment of code. I guess I just have trouble detaching myself from this thing that I've worked so hard on for the past 9 years.
Probably more than you wanted to hear... :) Those are some of the thoughts I've had about productivity.
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