Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

herwin@osf1.gmu.edu (HARRY R. ERWIN) writes:
>From my obsolete or dying list: ALGOL 60, ALGOL 68, PL/I, APL, SNOBOL,
>Pascal, CLU, Modula-2, Modula-3, JOVIAL, Prolog, Smalltalk-80.  I'm sure
>some people will beg to differ.

Your claim that Pascal is "obsolete or dying" will come as a great surprise
to the many _many_ Pascal programmers on PCs.  The live messages in the
comp.lang.pascal.* newsgroups here at the moment number about three thousand,
which is extremely high for an "obsolete or dying" language.  (For comparison,
it's about 10 times as many messages as in comp.lang.ada.)

Prolog is a strange choice too.  There are more Prolog vendors than Ada
vendors.  It's doing rather well for a language that has never had any
government agency, hardware vendor, or software vendor "pushing" it.
The real problem with Prolog is that it's a bit like Lisp:  it's so easy
to implement (which is not the same as being easy to implement _well_) and
so well connected to other areas of computing that it has exploded into
lots of variants.  There is far more creative energy going into developing
the logic programming paradigm than there is going into extending Ada, for
example.

Smalltalk usage is still growing, which makes it another strange choice for
a "dead or dying" language.

Modula-2 and Modula-3.  Has the Modula-2 standard been released yet?
Modula-3 offers useful facilities that are still missing from C++; it may
perhaps be dying, but it will be several years before it can honestly be
called "obsolete".

APL may or may not be dying.  Many of its ideas have shown up in Fortran 90,
and with MATLAB racing away it's clear that the APL _family_ is alive and
well (as for that matter is the Algol family; Ada is a member of that family
after all).  I think it's fair to include the fairly popular S-Plus in the
APL (interactive array-oriented) family too.

It's worth noting that
 - there's at least one commercially significant mainframe that is still
   programmed in a dialect of Algol 60 (it does have a C compiler, but it
   isn't really a C machine)
 - there's an Algol 68 compiler for this machine which I would be using
   if only I had ever figured out how to install it!
 - I have SNOBOL on this machine
 - this major workstaion has a vendor-provided and well supported Pascal
   (they wouldn't do that if they didn't think they'd make money at it!)
 - there are more Prolog systems available for this machine than you could
   possibly hope to make an informed choice from
 - there are several deductive data bases for this machine
 - there's a logic programming language that offers speed as good as C
   and static checking better than Ada
 - there is an excellent commercial Smalltalk for this machine, and
   there's at least one object-oriented data base using a Smalltalk
   dialect as its language (I've got a set of manuals but never used it)
 - IBM are still pushing PL/I for SAA, and their current PL/I is a very
   capable language (although in my view it still has most of the positive
   flaws that distinguished old PL/I)
 - there is a free Simula 67 compiler for this machine, which I have.




-- 
Four policemen playing jazz on an up escalator in the railway station.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.