C# 3.0 finally provides some competition to COBOL/xBase

Well PDC is underway and for all the nice Vista, WinFX and Office 12 news, what really excites me most is LINQ (Language INtegrated Query). This is huge. Finally COBOL and xBase have some serious competition in terms of language integrated data capabilities. I've always been tickled by the fact that even though COBOL is a horrible programming language by many measures, it's persisted data handling features are unmatched by most modern programming languges. Do not argue about that with me. I was made to suffer a semester of COBOL plus a mini project in my Engineering and I am intimately aware of it benefits and deficiencies :) That's precisely why a large proportion of business software (esp. on Mainframes etc) is still in COBOL! Heck .Net was a huge blessing for the COBOL folks who promptly became modern by implementing COBOL in .Net and automagically being able to use all the .Net features. That should also tell you that there is enough money to be made in that. It's nice that finally I will have some of the ease of data use features in C# that was available decades ago in COBOL. To be fair the xBase languages also had integrated data handling features but there are significant differences. For one the xBase products weren't true Relational Databases. For another, none of those languages managed to become widely used general purpose programming languages. xBase languages were nice for their days but can't hold against modern languages. The nice thing here is that you now have Query support in general purpose programming languages and the base programming framework. Trust me that's a huge thing.

Edit: Added links to the relevant technologies being discussed.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 14, 2005
  It’s nice to have a language that is closely tied to the data. LINQ moves closer because we now don’t have to sandwich the SELECT in a bunch of quotes and string vars. Also the LINQ provides crucial intelisense for yet more productivity. But tightly linked programming languages like Visual Foxpro provide even more debugging productivity that I would like to see in C#:
  1)You can readily view your data with a single BROWSE command. To see values of the ADO is cumbersome at best 2)You can REPLACE any value with a desired value in a table during debug-time to change the dataset on the fly. In C# it’s read-only. 3) You can SKIP to any record you want on the fly to run code on just the records you want. C# you can’t. 5)I would like to use LINQ then instantly go to the ‘Command window’ and see the resultant data set in a spreadsheet format. That’s the advantage of a language closely inked to the data.
  
• Anonymous
  September 14, 2005
  I am quite sure that once LINQ makes it into C# then you would be able to debug better. I haven't tried it but you can download the LINQ preview from MSDN and try it out to see what its like now -
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/future/
• Anonymous
  September 16, 2005
  On point #1 above, .Net 2.0 already provides facilities for adding your own debugging viewers for any kind of object you want. I saw an article a while back showing how to make a dataset viewer, available while debugging.