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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 21:43:56 -0000 (UTC)
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On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 12:00:23 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> What mattered in COBOL applications was no bugs. None. Not one.

*Cough* Y2K *Cough*

> The process of analysing a business and creating business oriented
> applications that were 100% reliable lead to system analysts working out
> how to do it and passing the specification down to programmers and
> testing every single module.

You *do* realize that the “waterfall” method (what you described above) 
was only put up as a strawman in a 1970s research paper to advocate for 
more versatile software development techniques? Nobody in the real world 
worked that way -- not successfully. Because it was a recipe for producing 
software that was out of date by the time it shipped.

> This is big corporation stuff .

You really think big corporations like, say, Google or Facebook, work that 
way?

> IIRC Microfocus COBOL still makes a profit.

Microfocus makes a profit, yes. But not from its COBOL compiler.