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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Women should rule IT again, not just because inheritance in Cobol functions differently than in other languages.

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/09/22

From a while back, but still relevant: [WayBack] Vererbung funktioniert in Cobol anders als in anderen Sprachen… – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

Translated, this is:

I found some COBOL code at a client. Nothing special. The last comment in it was from 1985, written by my mother. That was my WTF moment of the year, including the look on the face of the technical manager: here inheritance gets a totally different perspective.

An interesting take from that thread is that in the past, women ruled IT.

They should do this again while they can, as a mixed team can combine “first time right” with “minimum viable product”. It is all about balance.

Andreas Dorfer
Cool-Programmierung in den 70ern und frühen 80ern scheint eine Frauendomäne gewesen zu sein. Zumindest bei uns waren die letzten Aktiven daran in den späten 90ern (die mehr als nur Hotfixes drangebastelt haben), gestandene Frauen mit Lesebrillen an Perlenketten.

Jeroen Wiert Pluimers
+Andreas Dorfer yup, and they were doing excellent jobs. Women still could rule IT, there are just to few working in IT.

Andreas Dorfer
+Jeroen Wiert Pluimers those folks really listened and asked relevant questions before making any half baked proposal. Then they produced a lot of documents in binders, including flow diagrams… made a prototype, tested the unit and produced another binder full of paper.. And if there any question after going live, they just told you on the phone: “Look at sheet xy, paragraph z, there we documented this behaviour as conforming your request. Shall we schedule a meeting to setup a change request together?”. They had been working like accounting: sometimes incredibly slow, but with precision and accuracy… if things went wrong, the best advice was always to ask yourself, where you might have a flaw in the initial request.

Andreas Dorfer

Archive.is 384da9306d6501301d80001dd8b71c47 (900×266)

This apart from the fact that comments have not changed much over time:

[WayBack] Thread by @grauhut: “Ich habe bei einem Kunden COBOL Code gefunden. Gut. Mainframe. Nichts ungewöhnliches. Der letzte Kommentar ist von 1985. Von meiner Mutter. […]”

–jeroen

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