Abstract
COBOL source code is among the oldest and the newest software ever written.
Mainframes are among the oldest and newest machines to run it on. What do we learn when we hold the COBOL experience up to general software engineering knowledge? What might COBOL stakeholders learn from the laws of software engineering? In this talk, we put up a frame for the discussion about the future of engineering COBOL systems: a challenging mix of technology, personnel, and financial management. What knowledge do we already have and what new knowledge do we need to find to improve decision-making?
Bio
Jurgen Vinju is part-time full-professor at TU Eindhoven and senior researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in the SWAT research group, and co-owner of SWAT.engineering BV. His research and engineering efforts are all targeted at managing software complexity through meta-programming: software that analyses, manipulates, generates or visualizes the source code of other software. Rascal is the metaprogramming language that he co-designed and implemented, which is applied to a wide variety of software engineering challenges in research, education, and industry.
