Subject: Found on an L.A. Bulletin Board System
From: Shiffman@SWW-WHITE at CCC
To: Info-COBOL@MIT-CCC@S at SWW-WHITE
Date: 25 Nov 1984 21:30:51-EST

*-  N A T U R A L   C H I L D B I R T H  -*
                  -My Least Favorite Spectator Sport
                                      -By Dave Barry

Reprinted  (without  permission,  naturally)   from  THE  PLAIN   DEALER
magazine, 8/2/81
  
    Let's  take  a  quick  look  at  the  history  of  baby-having.  For
thousands of years, only women had babies. Primitive women would go  off
into primitive  huts  and  groan  and  wail  and sweat while other women
hovered around. The  primitive men  stayed outside  doing manly  things,
such as lifting heavy objects and spitting.

    When the baby  was born, the  women would clean  it up as  best they
could and show it to the men who would spit appreciatively and head  off
to the  forest  to  throw  sharp  sticks  at  small  animals. If you had
suggested to primitive men  that they should  actually watch women  have
babies, they would  have laughed  at you  and probably  tortured you for
three or four days. They were real men.

    At the beginning of the 20th century, women started having babies in
hospital rooms. Often  males were  present, but  they were  professional
doctors who  were  paid  large  sums  of  money  and  wore masks. Normal
civilian males  continued  to  stay  out  of  the baby-having area; they
remained in waiting rooms  reading old copies  of Field and  Stream, and
activity that  is  less  manly  than  lifting  heavy  objects  but still
reasonably manly.

    What I'm getting at is that,  for most of history, baby- having  was
mainly in the hands (so to speak)  of women. Many fine people were  born
under this system, Charles Lindbergh, for example.

    Things changed though in the 1970s, The birth rate dropped  sharply.
Women started  going  to  college  and  driving  bulldozers and carrying
briefcases and freely using such  words as debenture.  They  just didn't
have time to  have babies.  For a  while there,  the only  people having
babies were  unwed  teenage  girls,  who  are  very  fertile and can get
pregnant merely by standing downwind from teenage boys.

    Then young professional  couples began to  realize that their  lives
were missing  something  -  a  sense  of stability, of companionship, of
responsibility for another  life.  So  they got  Labrador retrievers.  A
little later, they started  having babies again,  mainly because of  the
tax advantages.  These days you can't open your car door without hitting
a pregnant woman. But  there's a catch:  *Women now expect  men to watch
them have babies.* This is called "natural childbirth", which is one  of
those terms  that  sound  terrific  but  that nobody really understands.
Another one is "pH balanced".

    At  first,  natural  childbirth  was  popular only with hippie-type,
granola-oriented couples, who  lived in  geodesic domes  and named their
babies things like  Peace Love  World Understanding  Harrington-Schwarz.
The males, their brains badly corroded by drugs and organic food,  wrote
smarmy articles about what  a Meaningful Experience  it is to  see a New
Life Come Into the World.

    None of these articles mentioned the various other fluids and solids
that come into the world with the New Life, so people got the impression
that watching somebody have a baby was just a peck of meaningful fun. At
cocktail parties, you'd run into  natural childbirth converts who  would
drone on for hours, giving you a contraction-by- contraction account  of
what went on  in the  delivery room.   They were  worse than Moonies, or
people who tell you how  much they bought their  houses for in 1973  and
how much they're worth today.

    Before long, natural childbirth was everywhere like salad bars,  and
now perfectly innocent civilian males all over the country are  required
by federal law to watch females have babies. I recently had to watch  my
wife have a baby in Bryn Mawr. *Bryn Mawr*, for God's sake.

    First we  had to  go to  10 evening  childbirth classes.  Before the
classes, the hospital told us, mysteriously, to bring two pillows.  This
was the first humiliation, because no  two of our pillowcases match  and
many have beer  or cranberry-juice  stains. It  may be  possible to walk
down the streets of some  towns with stained, unmatched  pillowcases and
still feel dignified, but that is not possible in Bryn Mawr.

    Anyway, we showed up for the first class, along with about 15  other
couples consisting of women  who were going  to have babies  and men who
were going to have to watch them.  They all had matching pillowcases. In
fact,  some  couples  had   obviously  purchased  tasteful   pillowcases
especially for childbirth class; these were the Main Line-type  couples,
wearing golf  and  tennis  apparel,  who  were  planning to have wealthy
babies.  They  sat  together  through  all  the  classes, and eventually
agreed to get together for brunch.

    The classes consisted of sitting  in a brightly lit room  and openly
discussing among other things, the uterus. Now I can remember a time, in
high school, when I would  have *killed* for reliable  information about
the uterus.  But  having  discussed  it  at  length,  having seen actual
full-color diagrams, I must say in all honesty, that although I  respect
it a great deal as an organ, it has lost much of its charm.

    Our childbirth-class instructor was  very big on the  uterus because
that's where babies generally  spend their time  before birth. She  also
spent some time on the ovum, which is near the ovaries. What happens  is
that the ovum hangs  around reading novels  and eating chocolates  until
along comes this big crowd of  spermatozoa, which are tiny, very  stupid
one-celled organisms. They're  looking for  the ovum,  but most  of them
wouldn't know it if they fell over it. They swim around for days, trying
to mate with the pancreas and whatever other organs they bump into.  But
eventually one stumbles into the ovum, and the happy couple parades down
the fallopian tubes to  the uterus. In  the uterus, the  Miracle of Life
begins, unless you believe the Miracle of Life does not begin there, and
if you think I'm going to get into that, you're crazy.  Anyway, the ovum
starts growing  rapidly  and  dividing  into  lots of little specialized
parts, not  unlike  the  federal  government.   Within six weeks, it has
developed all organs it needs to drool;  by 10 weeks, t has the  ability
to cry  in  restaurants.   In  childbirth  class,  they showed us theses
pictures of a fetus developing inside a uterus.  They didn't tell us how
the pictures  were  taken,  but  I  suspect  it involved a great deal of
drinking.

    We saw lots of pictures. One evening,  we saw a movie of a woman  we
didn't even know having a baby.  I am serious.  Some woman  actually let
some  moviemakers  film  the  whole  thing.   In  color.  She  was  from
California. Another time, the instructor announced, in the tone of voice
you might use to tell  people that they had  just won free trips  to the
Bahamas, that we were going to see color slides of a Caesarean  section.
The first slides showed her cheerfully holding a baby.  The last  slides
showed her cheerfully holding a baby.  The middle slides showed how they
got the baby out of  the cheerful woman, but  I can't give you  a lot of
detail here because I had to go out  for 15 or 20 drinks of water.  I do
remember that at one point our instructor cheerfully observed that there
was "surprisingly little blood, really".  She evidently felt this  was a
real selling point.

    When we  weren't looking  at pictures  or discussing  the uterus, we
practiced breathing. This is where the pillows came in. What happens  is
that when  the  baby  gets  ready  to  leave  the uterus, the woman goes
through what the medical community laughingly refers to as contractions;
if it referred to them as "horrible  pains that make you wonder why  the
hell you ever decided to get pregnant", people might stop having  babies
and the  medical  community  would  have  to go into the major-appliance
business.

    In the  old days,  under President  Eisenhower, doctors  avoided the
contraction problem by  giving lots  of drugs  to women  who were having
babies.  They'd knock them out during the delivery, and the women  would
wake up when  their kids  were entering  the fourth  grade. But the idea
with natural childbirth is  to try to  avoid giving the  woman a lot  of
drugs, so she can share the first intimate moments after birth with  the
baby and father and  the obstetrician and  the pediatrician and  several
nurses and the person who cleans up the delivery room.

    The most important thing to the natural-childbirth people is for the
woman to breathe  deeply. Really.  The theory  is that  if she  breathes
deeply, she'll get all relaxed and won't notice that she's in a hospital
delivery room wearing a truly perverted garment and having a baby.   I'm
not sure who came up with this theory. Whoever it was evidently believed
that women have very small brains.

    So, in childbirth classes,  we spent a lot  of time sprawled out  on
these little mats  with our  pillows while  the women  pretended to have
contractions and the men squatted around with stopwatches and  pretended
to time them. The Main Line couples didn't care for this part. They were
not into squatting.  After  a couple of  classes, they started  bringing
little backgammon sets and playing backgammon when they were supposed to
be practicing breathing. I imagine they  had a rough time in  childbirth
unless they got the servants to have contractions for them.

    Anyway, my  wife and  I traipsed  along for  months, breathing,  and
timing, respectively.  We had no problems whatsoever. We were a terrific
team. We had a swell time.  Really.

    The actual  delivery was  slightly more  difficult. I  don't want to
name names, but I held up *my*  end. I had my stopwatch in  good working
order and I told my wife to breathe. "Don't forget to breathe," I'd say,
or, "You should breathe, you know." She on the other hand was  unusually
cranky. For example, she  didn't want me  to use my  stopwatch.  Can you
imagine? All that practice, all that squatting on the natural-childbirth
classroom floor,  and  she  suddenly  gets  into  this  big  snit  about
stopwatches. Also, she almost  completely lost here  sense of humor.  At
one point, I made  an especially humorous  remark, and she  tried to hit
me.  She usually has an excellent sense of humor.

    Nonetheless, the baby came out all right, or at least all right  for
newborn babies, which is actually pretty  awful unless you're a big  fan
of slime. I thought I held up well for the whole thing when the  doctor,
who up  to  then  had  behaved  like  a perfectly rational person, said,
"Would you like to see  the placenta?" Now let's  face it, this is  like
asking, "Would  you  like  me  to  pour  hot  tar  into  your nostrils?"
*Nobody* would *like* to see a placenta. If anything it would be a  form
of punishment:

    Jury: We  find the  defendant guilty  of stealing  from the  old and
	  crippled.

    Judge:  I sentence the defendant to look at three placentas.

    But without waiting for an answer, the doctor held up the  placenta,
not unlike the way you might hold up a bowling trophy. I bet he wouldn't
have tried that with people who have matching pillowcases.

    The placenta aside, everything worked out fine. We ended up with  an
extremely healthy, organic, natural baby, who immediately demanded to be
put back into the uterus.

    All in  all, I'd  say it's  not a  bad way  to reproduce, although I
understand that some members of  the flatworm family simply  divide into
two. 
  
           THE DAVE BARRY PARENTAL APTITUDE TEST
 * How do you feel about having partially digested food on your self and
   virtually everything you own?
    a) Fine    b) No Problem    c) Very Attractive

 *  How much sleep do you need each night?
    a) Less than one hour   b) None   c) Sleep makes me very irritable.

 *  How much do you want to know about excretions?
    a) A great deal     b)   Everything   c)  The more the better.
  
    Scoring: 0-10 You should have a baby immediately.
            10-20 Go ahead and have a baby.
            20-30 A baby would be very good for you to have.

Received: from MIT-CCC by MIT-OZ via Chaosnet; 25 Nov 84 22:31-EST
Date: 21 Nov 1984 21:05:17-EST
From: jfw at CCC
To: info-cobol@CCC
Subject: COBOL REIGNS SUPREME!

>From COMPUTERWORLD, some time back.  Just seemed appropriate...

	DESPITE MAINTENANCE FAULTS, COBOL REMAINS ENTRENCHED IN BUSINESS DP

		``No one fourth-generation language can replace Cobol.''

By Charles Babcock
Computerworld New York Bureau

NEW YORK - While fourth-generation languages offer great flexibility and ease
of use, even their advocates say they will have a tough time displacing Cobol.

Cobol is the entrenched language for about 80% of business data processing in
the U.S.  Its biggest drawback is the difficulty of modifying and documenting
COBOL programs, according to a panel of supporters and critics at the recent
Information Management Exposition and Conference in New York.

Cobol is no longer the clear and easy-to-read language that it was intended to
be when it was developed in 1959.  So programmers are constantly "reinventing
the wheel" when they rework Cobol programs, said Jerry Sitner, president of
Clarity Concept Systems in New York.

Only about 30% of Cobol's potential is used, Sitner claimed.  If coded
consistently and documented well, Cobol programs would require far less
maintenance, he asserted.  In many installations, maintenance consumes more
than 50% of the programming resources.

Thomas Nies, president of Cincom Systems, Inc. of Cincinnati, a vendor of the
Mantis fourth-generation language, agreed that Cobol will remain popular for
some time.  But eventually, its high maintenance cost will outstrip the cost
of writing a new system in a more productive language, he said.  Nies added
that no one fourth-generation language can replace Cobol.  Rather, several
different languages are needed to handle different tasks with varying degrees
of power.  Powerful procedural languages will be used to write structured
systems software, while flexible, nonprocedural languages will be more
productive for iterative applications development, he said.

Nies further asserted that compilers are the cause of much of the programming
crisis that exists today.  Compilers were needed when computers were slow and
memory was scarce, he noted.  But because they require constant relinking and
recompiling of programs, they are inadequate for today's fast-changing DP
environment.

Nies said the use of Cobol has created a bottleneck in systems development.
It is the Cobol programmer who is responsible for integrating the functions of
applications, teleprocessing monitors and data base management systems, he
noted.  When instructions are converted to Cobol, they must be poured through
the compiler's machine language funnel.  A fourth-generation, interpretive
language uses no compiler and side-steps the bottleneck, he said.

Kathyrn K. Miller, manager of a program development group at Mobil Oil Corp.
in Fairfax, Va., said her staff developed a new system of 126 programs in 247
days using Information Builders, Inc.'s Focus, Execucom Corp.'s IFPS and
SAS Institute, Inc.'s SAS.  Doing the same task in Cobol would have taken more
than 2,000 days, she said.

Easy-to-read fourth-generation languages allow quick changes as well as quick
development, she said.  By using them, she and her staff have "almost
eliminated the maintenance backlog."

But no one fourth-generation languages does all the tasks of Cobol, so none
of them are candidates to replace Cobol, she added.  Nevertheless, she
believes that fourth-generation languages are here to stay and "are getting
better every day."  Their main drawback is that they consume more computer
resources.  Batch processing takes five times as long with a fourth-generation
language as with Cobol, she said.

Rober Wagner, programming manager of Furr's, Inc. of Lubbock, Texas, a Cobol
advocate, said the problem with Cobol is not its inherent limitations so much
as "the widespread incompetence in the programming industry."

Fourth-generation advocate Nies agreed.  As programmers become proficient in
Cobol, they move on to become systems analysts or some other learning
position, he said, leaving average programmers to work in Cobol.