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[Sheldon T. Hall]

Lionel Peterson writes ...
> From: "Sheldon T. Hall" <shel at cmhcsys.com>
> > ConWiz has it that the average programmer turns out the
> > equivalent of 3
> > lines of COBOL code per day, on average.  Typing speed
> > wouldn't seem to
> > change that very much, since 3 lines of COBOL doesn't
> > represent much typing at all.
>
> I take it you've never programmed in COBOL three lines of
> COBOL is a lot of typing ;^)

Yeah, but it does a lot.

Actually, although I've been programming for a long time, and have worked in
over 20 languages, I've done remarkably little COBOL.  My current employer
is a mostly-COBOL shop, but I haven't touched our COBOL.  I work, instead,
in our proprietary scripting language.

> I think that statistic is BS anyway, unless it is truely
> accurate,

Hmmm.  I think that could be said of any statistic ... even the 92.3 percent
that are fabricated.

> and it
> reflects the reality that a COBOL programer these days spends
> most of their
> time maintaining old code, not writing new code...

... or in meetings.

However, I know that one programmer at our place has produced over 20,000
net lines of shipped, production COBOL in the last 6 years.  I've done about
that much in our scripting language, plus bunches of Bourne shell and bits
of Expect, C and Perl.  To make up for that, we used to have a guy whose
code, in addition to being amazingly verbose (he never reused a temporary
variable), was sprinkled with things like ...

	x = x

... which he believed "returned the previous value of x."  His net output
was probably in the negative numbers....

-Shel