One of the cool things about getting old is that wonderful new software you help develop when you were a youngster is now an antique supported by no-one except a few old timers who knows how it works.
Management is so stupid and incompetent they can’t seem to replace the system—over and over again they hire contractors who fail. Successful software development projects should be called the eighth wonder of the world—there is a rumor they exist somewhere but they sure are hard to find.
We are converting from Oracle Forms to Groovy. The leads were panicking because we had to convert all that Forms code.
Oracle Forms is written in PL/SQL, which is the same language in Oracle Procedures and Functions. Just spin it to packages and call it from Groovy.
I was on a successful project at the phone company. It was because a team leader asked me to a group to make a software switch among applications. But we had no manager to direct us. So Steve (RIP) and I butted heads together and came up with a rather elegant solution composed of mostly copied COBOL code. We had the chance to put more time into design than coding, and allow the elegance to emerge. Then the manager showed up, and asked to see our code. Our code was a collection of interchangeable routines and subroutines with a smattering of custom code, and the ‘rules’ of the interaction with the switch. So a few weeks after the new manager arrived, we reported we were done coding. A good portion of the manager’s time was then spent with helping her friend on one of the applications using the switch, who had been re-writing code for months. In the end we were writing utilities to help other applications debug their use of the ‘switch’. So, early delivery and under budget.
What you said plus main frames are better than client server systems.
Ain't that the truth.