Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

["Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96" <condicma@PWFL.COM>]

Robert Dewar <dewar@MERV.CS.NYU.EDU> writes:
>There are literally thousands of miscellaneous languages that have been
>used a bit, so it is agood thing that many have died off. Let's raise
>the bar a bit and ask for examples of languages that have not survived
>that had at least a national standard, and which were used on a wide
>variety of large projects.
>
    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,
    etc. have all had similar heyday's and then dwindled into relative
    obscurity (note I say *relative* here, just in case someone takes
    this as an attack on their pet language.) It's sort of like aging
    movie stars or old soldiers: They never die, just fade away.

    MDC
Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer     ATT:        561.796.8997
Pratt & Whitney GESP, M/S 731-96, P.O.B. 109600  Fax:        561.796.4669
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600                  Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
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