sas@BBN.COM (04/18/88)
I wonder if we can get the same arguments going about "business programming". For example, ----- - How can you tell if a program is a business program? They deal with dollars (or other monetary units). Hmm, so an employee assignment program which only deals with people's names, times and office numbers is not a business program. How about, it deals with time or money? So if we write a program to see who is elible for class IIB promotions, but we don't actually check existing salaries, then it isn't a business program, but if it checks salaries then it is. So how about, people, time or money? I see, so a program that can read Victorian novels and answer questions about them is a business program. - Why do we program in COBOL? After all, COBOL is a pretty specialized language that can barely run on a SUN 3/50. You can obviously rewrite anything written in COBOL in C. But C doesn't support pictures. Good grief, you can write a library routine. Besides, who makes enough money to really need commas. And it isn't file I/O oriented. You can use structures and call UNIX subroutines. And it doesn't support decimal arithmetic. Call a subroutine and call FASB and explain why the C way of computing interest payments is better than their way. And where's the report generator? I can get more done in 10 lines of RPG than 10 pages of hairy C code .... Serves me right for arguing with a COBOL programmer.. Now that I've sundered every DP department to its philosphical roots, they'll all start hacking 68020 machine code and deactivate my cash machine card. ---- Sound familiar? ---- I'll make the argument that business people use languages like COBOL (or 1-2-3) and AI people use languages like LISP (or LOOPS) because they make it easier to write down the concepts they are dealing so a computer (or other programmer) can understand them. You don't write a loop to slide the dollar sign next to amount payable and you don't shift bits around to see if an item is a fixnum or a rational. Business programmers write programs that deal with the structures of business. This means they deal with people, resources, time and money or whatever else it takes to keep the business running. AI programmers write programs that deal with the structures of knowledge and reasoning. This means they deal with ontologies, relationships, searching, recognition and transformation or whatever else it takes to make a computer perform the tasks that are associated with human intelligence. I won't try and define "intelligence" here and I won't try and define "business" here. Seth ---- Letter Foot ----