[geeks] rlogin for MacOS

[joshua d boyd]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 03:01:27AM -0400, Ken Hansen wrote:
> > I recently mentioned COBOL to a CS major.  He had no idea what I was
> > talking about.
> 
> Kids... ;^)
> 
> COBOL was dead about 15-20 years ago, along with the mainframe. Funny how
> long it is taking all those thousands and thousands of folks making a nice
> living getting work done using COBOL and Mainframes to realize they aren't
> useful any more... ;^)

COBOL still lives in some places.  Circa '96, BYTE had an article on a
company that decided that rather than replace all their COBOL running
mainframes with C running Suns, that they rather liked COBOL, and would
rather just get a more modern COBOL environment and stick with COBOL on
Suns, and that is what they did.

And mainframes are sorta making a comeback, although who really makes them
anymore other than IBM?
 
> My previous school had a debate on teaching COBOL to graduates of the CS
> program (in 1987), half the dept. felt that that was too "Vo-Tech", the
> other half felt the graduates should be able to find employment...

Yeah, I think my school had that debate before I got there.  More
recently, VB has been brought up.  The Profs feel that if they do their
jobs right, then the student should be able to instantly pick up any
language.  But really, the profs are mainly just teaching procedural
programming with a little OO, so people tend to be sunk when it comes to
functional, true OO, or declaritive/constraint languages.  I mean, I
consider myself to be one of the better students in the program, and I'm
having quite a bit of difficulty with learning Scheme.
 
> > And god help me when I try to mention the benefits of using languages like
> > FORTRAN and lisp in this day and age.
> 
> Can you use FORTRAN to write web server scripts? ;^)

Well, since CGI is just stdio and environment variables, I would imagine
so.  Further, doesn't VisualFortran allow you to write COM objects in
Fortran?  If so, then more reason you can write web scripts in it.

But, one of the best arguments I've heard for FORTRAN is that it is easier
to make optimizing compilers for it than it is for C.  And from what I
hear about Crays, I can believe it.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd