WRT@CORNELLC.BITNET (Bill Turner, Cornell University Library) (02/02/90)
Yes, old-fashioned programming is rapidly becoming a lost art. Cornell once taught a lot of mainframe programming, but what the Computer Science dept. now considers a "mainframe" is a MicroVAX running UNIX. PL/I, COBOL, and Assembler are all gone, replaced by Pascal and C running on the Vaxen or micros. The current environment is very interesting. New applications are being done here mostly using Natural (Software AG's 4GL), but after they're done, the response time is abysmal. NOTIS, on the other hand, is a major pain to work on, but once it's going, it gives far superior response time...