Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

[Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> I'd question that statistic. "Developed" as in "Developed today on new 
> program starts?" or "Developed" as in "Historically since the beginning 
> of computer languages, more programs have been developed in..." Guess it 
> depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is... ;-)

Question all you want. How about "developed" as in being used by 
developers today? It may be modifications to existing programs, but more 
developers are being paid to use COBOL than any other language.

> I'd also disagree with characterizing Cobol as a "failure" when in its 
> day it succeeded in capturing nearly *all* of the business programming 
> market. Did Ada capture nearly *all* of the embedded programming market? 
> I like Ada, but if the definition of "success" is "achieving the stated 
> goal" and the original stated goal of Ada was to address the embedded 
> market, someone could make a fair case that capturing less than 1% of 
> that market might just qualify as a "failure" by a reasonably objective 
> standard. Or can anyone/anything be a success just by setting the bar 
> low enough?

Ada's goal was to be used for embedded weapon SW for the US DOD. In its 
heyday, it captured far more than 1% of that market, assisted by the 
mandate. I guess by your definition Ada was a success.

COBOL wasn't a failure. I was simply quoting your own words about Ada in 
an attempt at humor. It's because of its success that COBOL is so widely 
used today. Businesses that have a lot of SW in COBOL don't want to have 
SW in a lot of different languages, so they stick with COBOL. In that 
they are smarter than the DOD is today.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"So if I understand 'The Matrix Reloaded' correctly, the Matrix is
basically a Microsoft operating system--it runs for a while and
then crashes and reboots. By design, no less. Neo is just a
memory leak that's too hard to fix, so they left him in ... The
users don't complain because they're packed in slush and kept
sedated."
Marin D. Condic
65