Brad,

This is a good point.  The motivation of the programmer would undoubtedly play a significant role in the total cost of any retraining process.  Personally, I've never understood the religious wars over which (language|os|CPU|&c) was better than another.  Each has its place and I have always found that what one learns on one can often be generalized and applied to all others.  I therefore feel that the long term cost of training, while maintaining user interface continuity (I'm not talking about GUI v Character, but how and where information is organized and presented), was probably much lower than the cost of teaching a newbie how things should work.

I think articles like this one tend to perpetuate managements binary decision bias.  Sometimes it is better to have both than only one or the other.

An anecdotal aside.  Some years ago I went and took classes in C and C++ (we were gonna need it, never did write a single production program with either of them).  The instructor kept talking about how C++ was so great because of its object orientedness.  I pointed out that a number of things which make C++ an OO (data hiding (I forget the correct term) and others) were part of my COBOL tool box for a long long time.  He was quite flabbergasted that this was possible.  Toward the end of the class we had a discussion on the relative merits of each language on what programs could be written in each one, the only deficiency that we could find in COBOL is that it required a real effort to overwrite memory when compared with C.

>>> Brad Feazell <[log in to unmask]> 02/13/01 12:16PM >>>
What's not being said is that many Cobol programmers, while very capable,
are not interested in Java or any other new language.

If you took a UNIX admin and told him/her that starting tomorrow, they would
be training for NT administration - they would most likely start looking for
a job. If your company decided to replace all it's HP3000s with NT boxes,
would you start looking for a job? Is this any different for a Cobol
programmer who was given the "opportunity" to learn Java?

So I think you have also consider that many Cobol programmers just want to
coast in to the finish line without starting over with a radical new
language. In a way I think it's a shame and in another way I understand. At
some point in our careers, I think a lot of us will decide to pass on the
new language. For me personally, I hope that day is a long way off.

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