Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Cobol hit the world at a time when the only other programming language 
choices were Fortran and assembler. For those who had work that looked 
like business data processing, it was a no-brainer: There was nothing 
else that even remotely met their needs. Cobol suffered from lots of 
things like excessive verbosity and clumsy control structures, but it 
was either that or go use Fortran or assembler. Once it got established, 
there was no way to eradicate it.

Ada, OTOH tried to address the needs of embedded systems programmers and 
missed the mark for a variety of reasons. Probably chief among them was 
that embedded programmers already had something - C - which was cheap 
and small and could be made to fit just about any processor - and was 
available for just about any microprocessor. Ada was huge and cost a 
fortune and couldn't be made to work for small microprocessors and was 
not available for most targets. Given that people had choices and Ada 
wasn't meeting their needs, mandate or not, they went elsewhere.

The moral of the story: Find out what the customer wants/needs before 
you build a huge product and try to sell it to them.

MDC



Leon Winslow wrote:
> 
> 
> There is an irony here that most people might not appreciate.  COBOL was
> the first language mandated by the federal government.  I don't know if
> Ada was the second or there were one or more other languages in between
> these two.
> 
> Some interesting questions might be:  Why was one more widely used than
> the other.  What did the government do differently with COBOL and Ada
> and what effect did it have?
> 
> Lee Winslow
> 


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Marin David Condic
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