> That said, this one really is a truth: "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."
How's COBOL not simple though? COBOL is still in use in major banks today. We're not talking about an old Commodore 64 (love that machine by the way) still used by a lone mechanic in some rural area to compute wheel alignment (which does exists too): we're talking about at least hundred of millions of lines of COBOL still use in use throughout the world. Maybe still billions of line.
And it all just work.
COBOL has proved its reliability. I don't remember the language as particularly hard: a bit of a straightjacket but it isn't complicated, it's simple.
Dijkstra is not implying anywhere that COBOL is "complex".
On the other hand, I would not even call COBOL in itself reliable. I used it twice in my career, and it always needed a tremendous amount of handholding from user and developers to run, and very often the main user HAD to be a developer.
The first time was in a major bank, and the second time it was in a major university. My job in both cases was to migrate away from it and have a system that could run independently rather than needing a developer babysit it.
How's COBOL not simple though? COBOL is still in use in major banks today. We're not talking about an old Commodore 64 (love that machine by the way) still used by a lone mechanic in some rural area to compute wheel alignment (which does exists too): we're talking about at least hundred of millions of lines of COBOL still use in use throughout the world. Maybe still billions of line.
And it all just work.
COBOL has proved its reliability. I don't remember the language as particularly hard: a bit of a straightjacket but it isn't complicated, it's simple.