High Level/Functional Design

It doesn't work for me, especially when I'm at home. The TV always ends up getting turned on or more doodles start appearing than words. I've been reading alot of JoelOnSoftware.com lately and I wanted to write some specs. I'm working on a Perl program to keep track of all the talks scheduled for my University so people can view them on a webpage or a department can include the listing in their page or a user could sign up for an email list. I gave up, I figure getting more code out is more important than a document. I did outline the tasks rather nicely. I'm the only person working on the project so it isn't a big deal.

COBOL

Perl is very different from COBOL, which is what I do during the day. COBOL only has a handful of verbs. It's been around long enough that all bugs have been flushed out of the system so nothing unexpected happens. It has mature tools, good editors(once you get used to them), good debugging packages and good analysis of crashes even if it's not in the debugger. But all of the programs I write are the same, you can't do anything progressive with it. Object Oriented COBOL is out but I doubt many people use it in production. COBOL code is only being maintained, the bare minimum new programs are being written. Everyone is working on their J2EE web interfaces to the legacy systems sitting underneath it. I think it's a good idea, it's alot cheaper and it pleases the users if the interface is designed well enough.

Life

Back to college in 8 days.