P.T. BARNUM said there’s a sucker born every minute, but Barnum was a conservative estimator — or else he didn’t know any IT managers. For more than 45 years now, I’ve watched an endless stream of technical “solutions” being promoted, sold, and quickly put on the shelf and forgotten.
Come to think of it, forgetting these “solutions” is not such a bad result. As someone once said: “A problem is the solution to the previous problem.” At least forgotten solutions don’t become bigger problem than they were supposed to solve.
Remember COBOL? What was it supposed to solve?
As Jean Sammet recalls in her History of Programming Languages, the users for whom COBOL was designed were two subclasses of those people concerned with business data processing problems.
One is the relatively inexperienced programmer for whom the naturalness of COBOL would be an asset, while the other type of user would be essentially anyone who had not written the program initially.
