Folks,

Okay, I've finally gotten started on my post-Y2K project. Almost no content written yet, but you can get an idea of what's going on by visiting my web site or the new Greenspun-style discussion forum that I've set up.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (HumptyDumptyY2K@yourdon.com), August 05, 1999

Answers

Love the Name!

-- Mike Lang (webflier@erols.com), August 05, 1999.

Fascinating idea...

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), August 06, 1999.

Totally cool! "Set Recovery On" ...
Already favorited these bookmarks. Breath of fresh air, cheers!

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), August 06, 1999.

Great idea, with all that Sonoran high desert landscape around you it should be easier to think clearly about what's next !!

Though your idea for a book brings to mind a probing question: What section will the librarian/bookstore categorize it under???? Does she/they put it under fiction or nonfiction? Science Fiction or Horror? Religious or Prophetic? Comedy or Tragedy? Extremist or Mainstream? New Age or Old World? Polly/Troll or Doomer? OOPS...

You might have the first and only book that gets yanked from one section and into another right after the new year starts, yep, I'm goin' with Science Fiction section (pre Y2K ) to Non Fiction BEST SELLER (post Y2K), assuming that the bookstores will even be OPEN!!!

Maybe Border's Books will come up with a new category this fall entitled: Bump in the Road books or BRB's.

Hopefully, will be a refreshing change to the focused mindset most of us GI's now have and will open our minds to new opportunities and serious challenges that may exist in the near future and how best to align ourselves with these options. Go on, give it your best shot!!!!

-- rob (rgt350@aol.com), August 06, 1999.

Ed

Interesting idea, good for us creative types :o)

If I may make a couple of comments

Could you put more information about your consept on the new forum so folks from this forum can go there and check the about page? You should have at least a link and a small discription.

On your home page the title is TEOTWAWKI, why not try TEOTWAYKI (the end of the world as you know it) as a change of pace? In my mind the latter is much more personal and will discribe the effects of Y2K more realisticly. The former has this stigma that the world will end and of course that is going to take a few billion years.

I am going to be following this with great curiosity.

And always remember

Before Y2K chop wood and haul water

After Y2K chop wood and haul water.

(Canadian mantra:o)

-- Brian (imager@home.com), August 06, 1999.

At last, a site for after january 1...

Great new forum, Ed. Thanks...

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), August 06, 1999.

I like the name too :~}

-- number six (Iam_not_a_number@hotmail.com), August 06, 1999.

I hope you point out in your book that post Y2K is a GREAT time to get moving on those long delayed data warehousing and data mining projects!

-- Anonymous99 (Anonymous99@Anonymous99.xxx), August 06, 1999.

WOW! And I thought you were "kind of" on vacation.

-- Jon Johnson (narnia4@usa.net), August 06, 1999.

C O B O L R E P O R T

---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- An Open Letter to Ed Yourdon Editors note - Ed Yourdon was sent a copy of this column to provide him an opportunity to respond.

He declined, citing a lack of time.

How long does a community of programmers stand by and listen while their professional accomplishments, reputations, and very intelligence are disparaged and attacked? How many inflammatory statements does it take to cross the line before saying enough is enough?

The time is now. Enough is enough. This column usually takes an impartial third-person tone: the gentlemanly approach to editorialize. Not today. It is time to replace the "We" with "I" and get into the fray on a first-name basis. It has gotten personal. Although never much of a fan, I was, nonetheless, reading Ed Yourdons Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer when his constant harangue on all things Cobol finally took their toll. It was not that Yourdon simply has negative things to say about Cobol, I appreciate honest criticism of Cobol, it is that his criticisms are without merit and groundless.

Originally entitled "Ed Yourdon is a ****" I restrained myself, and toned down the columns title. As tempting as it is to respond, in kind, to Yourdons mindless attacks I will instead concentrate on some of his statements concerning Cobol from Rise and Resurrection.

Yourdon - "... then it's only a matter of time before all the existing COBOL programmers die of old age. Hopefully, the legacy COBOL code which has been estimated at 18-200 billion lines of code will die with them. Or, if it must be kept alive, maybe it will all be outsourced to some part of the world where COBOL maintenance programming is considered a pleasant alternative to growing rice or raising pigs."

Ed, Ed, Ed. In only three sentences you manage to insult a group of over two million Cobol programmers, and much of the third worlds population. I doubt there are many pig or rice farmers who could maintain, or enhance a Cobol application. Perhaps you should share your thoughts with the Human Resource departments who are paying premium finder fees to locate Cobol programmers.

Although you may wish for the demise of Cobol the Gartner Group estimates that 2-5 billion lines of new Cobol code are added to the base each year. Were not talking maintenance, or enhancements - this is new code, Ed. In addition, the Gartner Group found 65 percent of all new mission-critical applications in 1995 were written in Cobol. A 1995 study by Dataquest found Cobol for Windows based machines growing at 75 percent a year. A study by Sentry Market Research in 1996 found Cobol to be the second-favored language for developing client-server applications. Sentry Market Research, in 1996, found Cobol to be the only language rated more positively today than in 1993.

Yourdon - "The American (COBOL) programmer is dead; long live the American (Internet) programmer."

Ed, you can code Internet applications using Cobol. Micro Focus has extended the capability of the Accept and Display verbs to receive and present HTTP data. Parsing and deciphering HTML name/value pairs is no longer part of the business programming equation - it is accomplished behind the scenes where it belongs. Cobol as the interface language relieves managers who no longer need to deploy Perl scripts of questionable security. The ability to use Cobol as the CGI language almost immediately allows legacy code to be Web- enabled, scaling up to a potentially limitless user-base overnight. Cobol as the gatekeeper brings the power of Cobols preeminent data- manipulation features into play; allows the gateway program to talk to other programs, databases, and transaction monitors; and leverages existing skill sets. Other Cobol vendors are working on similar solutions.

Fujitsu markets NetCobol, a compiler that translates Cobol code into 100% pure Java bytecodes. The Fujitsu solution is the realization of the one suggested by James Gosling (the creator of Java) when he stated, "I think COBOL is a fairly reasonable bet for the Java VM." The reality is the American Internet programmer is, quite probably, a Cobol programmer. I hope I didnt frighten you Ed.

Yourdon - "The hundred person COBOL projects are being replaced by five-person Visual Basic projects that renders our Cobol programmers expertise in MVS, JCL, CICS, and IMS utterly irrelevant."

That means one Visual Basic programmer can do the work of twenty Cobol programmers. I program in Visual Basic, and I had no idea I was doing twenty times more work than when coding in Cobol. The Cobol application I was going to write in about eight months, I will now write in Visual Basic. With my new Yourdon (1=20) math skills it should only take me about a week and a half. Thanks Ed.

MVS is becoming OS/390, mainframes are morphing into safe, secure servers, and IBM is actively developing middleware to complement and extend CICS, as well as introduce other transaction servers, across a sea of platforms. Cobol fits right into the picture with CORBAs recent standard for distributed Cobol objects, allowing Cobol to interoperate with other distributed objects around the Web and around the world. Your fixation with the past, Ed, fails to recognize the work accomplished by the Cobol community over the past ten years.

Yourdon - "...one could make the same Darwinian argument in favor of wholesale sacking of COBOL programmers and their replacement with younger, cheaper C++ programmers."

Here are the facts Ed. A study by IDC Technology in 1993 found C and C++ programmers to be among the most expensive in the market. The study further found, "The typical C programmer gets bogged down in a myriad of detail that a more business-oriented language, such as, Cobol, has been taking care of automatically during the 30 years of its existence."

A few other highlights of the study found the following:

 "Neither C or C++ is well suited to the requirements of IS organizations developing business applications."

 "Most experts today consider the Cobol language to be far more portable, and standardized, than the C/C++ languages."

 "Cobol compilers now achieve performance levels that are on a par with, or even better than C compilers."

 "C code is almost impossible to maintain."

 "Although many IS organizations use C to develop business applications, no vendor believes this is a wise direction."

Companies are always anxious to save money Ed. How about if you and I go see a Fortune 500 CIO whose companys existence depends on their information technology, and propose saving the company money by firing every Cobol programmer and hiring recent C++ college graduates? I bet we get thrown out, and rightly so, within a minute.

What is there to conclude about Yourdons criticisms on all things Cobol? One must first look at Yourdons agenda. As Robert L. Glass so delicately puts it in Februarys IEEE Software, "... Ed is selling solutions in some form or other, and it is much easier to sell them to people who have come to believe that their practitioners are indeed sloppy, undisciplined hackers..." Pure and simple Yourdon is a salesman. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks he replied, "Because thats where the money is." The biggest banks on the block use Cobol. The key is picking the Cobol lock. Cobol doesnt release new updates every six months, obsolescing everything from before. To make a living, the Yourdon-way, you need to convince people Cobol is no good and get them on the upgrade treadmill. Divorce them from proven technology. Different technology demands new processes, controls, training, and a host of other billable services. Enter Ed Yourdon.

Yourdon fancies himself a software clairvoyant. Someone who can perceive the twists and turns of the industry and advise its practitioners when to bob and when to weave. At least that is what he would like you to believe. A delicious irony, the Year 2000, and its soaring appetite for Cobol coders, makes short shrift of Yourdons self-ordained guru status. As far back as the early 90s, Peter deJager, Bob Bemer, and others were warning business of the looming millennium obstacle. One only needed to look at the supply of Cobol programmers, the inventory of legacy code and conclude the obvious - rising wages. Yet Yourdon couldnt see past his own biases to advise programmers to stay with Cobol and reap the coming financial windfall.

Consistent in promoting himself, and not just wrong, but dead-wrong, for almost 25 years, Yourdons legacy is in keeping with one of Americas finest traditions: snake-oil salesman.

Edmund C. Arranga

http://www.objectz.com/cobolreport/TCR_ayourdon.htm

-- Hey ED Remember this? (Yourdon@Is a . Hack), August 06, 1999.

Say Edmundo Orangatango,

Do you feel better NOW!!!! Got that all out of your system???? Start your own damn website for your rantings. Does all this rant imply you WON'T be getting a copy of Ed's new book ???? I hope your NOT a DAY TRADER !!!!!

-- **** off (children@play.com), August 06, 1999.

The point of the artice being that Ed Yourdon is incompetant and not to be trusted with regards to Y2K. Maybe he should change his title to Dr. Oftenwrong.

-- (Yourdon@Exposed.com), August 06, 1999.

Ed,

Good choice! (Kinda Y2K relaxing myself this month--with Chucks assistance).

The link to your new Forum (and web-site) is now up the the About area of the TBY2K Forum...

About the TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) Forum

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/ policy.tcl?topic=TimeBomb%202000%20%28Y2000%29

The end game begins. Good Luck!

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), August 06, 1999.