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From: herwin@osf1.gmu.edu (HARRY R. ERWIN)
Subject: Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?
Date: 1997/08/06
Message-ID: <5sag85$9n2@portal.gmu.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 262636070
References: <97080410223317@psavax.pwfl.com> <dewar.870871522@merv>
Organization: George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-08-06T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Robert Dewar (dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu) wrote:
: Marin says

: <<Well, it's probably fair to ask "What constitutes survival?" If
: one programmer at one shop is using the language once a year to
: maintain some legacy system, is that survival? Cobol used to be
: quite widely used and was the standard-issue programming language
: for business data processing. But when mainframes started to
: evaporate, Cobol kind of went with it. Oh sure, there's lots of
: folks still using Cobol, but the usage is nowhere near what it
: once was. Could this be considered a dead language? PL/1, RPG,
: >>


: The extraordinary thing is that this myth is actually believed by
: some experienced managers as well as programmers who simply don't know.

Until a week ago, I believed it, too, and then Dewar pointed me in the
right direction.  I trotted over like a good little horse, confirmed he
knew what he was talking about, and started passing the word in my little
corner of the world. 

: ---trimmed---

: It is not uncommon for people in limited environments to have extraordinarily
: curious ideas of what is going on. I often meet people in academic 
: environments who think Unix is a widely used system (an interesting
: statistic here is that OS/2, which everyone knows is a failure, has
: sold more copies than all versions of Unix in all of time).

'POSIX compliance' (read 'sorta like UNIX') is the operating system
version of the Ada mandate.  Interestingly, Windows NT is 'POSIX
compliant' to ensure that it can be bid on Govt contracts that require it,
and (IMHO) is nearly useless when it is used that way. (Is my cynicism
showing?) 

Cheers--
Harry Erwin, Internet: herwin@gmu.edu, 
Web Page: http://osf1.gmu.edu/~herwin 
PhD student in computational neuroscience (how bats echolocate)
Lecturer for CS 211 (data structures and advanced C++)
Senior Software Analyst supporting the FAA