COBOL being dead really is just a perception, just like the tendency to see
MPE as a legacy operating system and IMAGE as a legacy database.  My initial
coding of applications using ALLBASE make me glad that most of our
applications still use IMAGE.  Talk about being more trouble than its
worth.  Besides, IMAGE with a good third-party indexing package will beat
out any "official" relational database any day of the week.  The features
available in COBOL85 already take COBOL out of 3rd generation and make an
easy to code and maintain 4th (or nearly 4th) generation language.  Reminds
me of the tongue-in-cheek article in Computer World a few years ago about
how C was designed basically as a joke and never meant to be taken
seriously.  The joke is on us.

RON HORNER wrote:

> I was asked, not too long ago,  what I thought about COBOL being a dead
> language.  I took a step back and gave my option, that it's not a dead
> language.  I continued by suggesting that the rumors of this death was
> created by frustrated academics with too much time on their hands and
> not enough creativity to find something to do.
>
> I guess all of this defending of a programming language that I love,
> sparks a question.  Is COBOL really dead?  If it is what replaced it, or
> should replace it?  If it's not, what improvements are being made to it?
> And for those who think that the life expectancy of COBOL is dropping,
> how do we pump it up.
>
> COBOL was the first programming language I learned.  To this day, I
> always try to use it as a programming solution.  What are your thoughts.
>
> Later.