. . .

Scary. COBOL. It’s as old as I am. Although, I did learn it in school, and did make quite a bit of money during the ‘date crisis’ indirectly, and, it is verbose yes, but it’s really only good (IMO) for hierarchical databases. (Hierarchical > Relational > Document) And hierarchical databases are pretty good for financial activity, for the simple reason that accounting is a hierarchical problem. But man…. getting paid to do that today? ugh.

Every time you use an atm or a credit card (or do anything with the government) you’re hitting a cobol application. And they can take hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions) to replace.

On the other hand, do you know how many guys in their 60’s and 70’s work part time at $100+ per hour fixing trivial bugs or implementing ‘tweaks’, or minor feature changes?

All the high-return money is made at the front AND ends of the curve. All the low return money at the top of the curve.

Look at Java. Java is a sh-t language. but that sh-t will be around forever. Companies like it because it’s a high cost of entry language.

While I adored OOP, my favorite more recent innovation is fluent programming. I think functional is an understandable technique for reducing memory and pressing all variables onto the stack, lightening cleanup, and obtaining performance, both functional programming and closures are very ‘dirty’ … Man I don’t want to have to pay devs to debug that sh-t ten years from now.

I actually love LISP/PASCAL/Python/Php. I think .net, java. and js were sh-t technologies attempting to compensate for operating systems designed for long running processes on slow hardware. When the internet consists and needs short running (transactional) processes that interact with longer running services and caches.

js is still a sh-t language. And the combination of the browser standards and that js standards are inhibiting innovation.

We write an absurd number of lines of tests to compensate for what is a sh-t language.

Php is still the very closest ‘language’ to a de facto ‘language’. And that is why I like it. Stringy(scripty) languages are very close to natural language grammar, and we can deflate them into every subsidiary grammar. But we cannot inflate a deflationary grammar into natural grammar very easily.

Once you have objects over data types, and all your internal data stored in json (hierarchical strings masquerading as arrays, and once you have hierarchical, relational, and document databases, (it would be nice if there was one db that served all purposes) then there aren’t a lot of problems you can’t solve.

There will often if not always be some need for purely mathematical applications that must perform very large scale computations, and those projects are best suited for functional programming.

Otherwise, we are just in an interesting era where the browser technology is actually holding back innovation for the simple reason that standards committee’s do that. we need the option for bytecode distribution from any ‘better’ language than js. Or Js needs to evolve faster and leave behind the sh-t language era.