Migrating legacy applications: if it ain’t broke, don’t move it

Posted by Mike on Friday, April 8, 2011 - 290 views

Scaling of users and transactions has multiplied a hundred fold in the time since 20-year-old business IT applications written in older (often mainframe-centric) languages such as COBOL were written.  READ MORE

Agile is dead… as a term

Posted by Mike on Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - 317 views

Remember back when most developers worked with structured programming in languages like C, Fortran, Pascal, COBOL and PL/I? In our conversations and writing, many of us differentiated that new-fangled object-oriented programming and design stuff for years… And then, after a while, OOP languages and methodologies became standard. Read more on this at the SDTimes…

The Importance Of Assembly Language Programming

Posted by Mike on Friday, October 8, 2010 - 1,231 views

Generally speaking, you can divide the history of computers into four periods: the mainframe, the mini, the microprocessor, and the modern post-microprocessor. The mainframe era was characterized by computers that required large buildings and teams of technicians and manipulators to keep them going. More often than not, both academics and students had little direct touch with the mainframe – you handed a deck of punched cards to an operator and waited for the output to come out hours later. During the mainfame era, academics concentrated on languages and compilers, algorithms, and operating systems.

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I Use Dead Programming Languages

Posted by Mike on Monday, January 4, 2010 - 283 views

Ted Neward wrote in mid-2008 that Java is Dead Like COBOL. In many ways, I still see this as the case. Java has warts and wrinkles. … MORE