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:
>The idea that mainframes are evaporating is particularly ludicrous. Marin,
>have you noticed that IBM stock has outperformed the stock of all other
>major computer manufacturers in the last two years? Trust me, IBM does
>not make all its money selling PC's!
>
    The stock market is about making money - not making mainframes. So
    I can't really consider the value of IBM stock to be an indication
    of the mainframe market. IBM makes lots of stuff - PCs, servers,
    devices, and, yes, mainframes. I didn't say they were gone - just
    that they certainly aren't out there in anywhere near the
    percentage of market share as they were in, oh - let's say late
    60s to 70s.

>The mainframe market is alive and well, it is true that the rate of
>growth has declined, and no doubt ten years from now the picture will
>change somewhat.
>
    As I said - I'm not saying "gone" just dramatically declined. I
    don't know what's happening in the entire rest of the universe,
    but I work for a very large corporation and in my time here, I've
    watched the engineering & business environment migrate off of IBM
    mainframes to workstations/servers and desktop PCs. Yes we still
    have a few mainframes around and yes they still have their uses
    but they are nowhere near "king of the hill" that they once were.
    They are a "niche market".

>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).
>
    Oh, I don't know about being in a "limited environment" - As I
    said, I work for one of the larger corporations in the United
    States. This trend *could* be isolated to just United
    Technologies, but when I talk to folks at other large
    corporations, I generally discover the same trend - migration off
    of mainframes and more reliance on workstation/servers, networks
    and PCs. I tend to hear that this migration has been going on
    mostly for the better part of 10 years and that the plan is to be
    rid of the mainframes in the not too distant future. (Of course,
    one can argue that the "server" side of things is really just
    another kind of mainframe - but I think the original intent was to
    talk about those big behemoths that you fed punch cards to and ran
    batch jobs on and connected terminals to and programmed in
    Cobol/JCL or similar. With only a few twists though, that
    workstation/server thing just looks like a more elaborate version
    of the mainframe/terminal - you think? ;-)

>The fact that mainframes have disappeared from your environment cannot be
>extrapolated to the world at large.
>
    I can't imagine myself - or anybody else for that matter -
    presuming to speak for the world at large. I can only speak for
    what I see happening here at UTC. I can attest to the fact that we
    are not the only large corporation that has shoved the mainframes
    into a back closet and mostly forgotten them. There may be large
    corporations out there where the mainframes are going gangbusters
    - I would believe someone's testimony to this effect. But I would
    suspect that if we at UTC found it to be in our financial interest
    and the folks at several other large corporations found it in
    their financial interest, then it's likely to be in the financial
    interest of just about any corporation. I doubt we'll see the
    "classic" mainframe around in another dozen years - it will just
    morph into some new form and the marketing guys will tout it as a
    major advancement in technology.

>P.S. the going rate for a competent experienced COBOL programmer these
>days is between $150K and $200K -- not bad for someone working with
>a dead language on evaporating machines :-)
>
    Well, in fairness, the amount of money being made by a programmer
    is not necessarily a good indicator of the vitality of a given
    industry. (Although for $200k, maybe I should dust off my Cobol
    manual and get a resume out there! Nahhh. I'd probably have to
    leave Palm Beach. ;-)

    I'm sure there's some company out there making buggy whips and
    that they probably pay top dollar for an experienced, highly
    skilled buggy whip craftsman. Or try hiring a stone cutter to
    carve some gargoyles for the roof of your house - that'll likely
    cost a fortune too. :-)

    I think the question I was tossing out was "at what point do you
    want to consider a language 'dead'?" Certainly, there are people
    who still use Cobol, just as there are still people who use
    Pascal, PL/1, Algol, etc, etc, etc. They may even be doing a
    non-trivial level of work or have a non-trivial segment of the
    marketplace. But languages come and they go. There's a non-trivial
    number of people who keep alive Shakespearian English and some of
    them get paid pretty darned well for doing so (Ask Charleton
    Heston to come speak some Shakespear at you and see what the bill
    is likely to be :-) This is not the same as if these folks were to
    be using the language in their everyday lives.

    Maybe the whole characterization of a language being "dead" is a
    mistake anyway. Maybe, as I think I said in my original post, they
    don't really die - but rather fade away. In that sense, the whole
    original question of "Do you think Ada is going to be a dead
    language in 10 years?" is - to use one of your favorite words -
    ludicrous. It will likely still be around in some form in 30
    years. It will likely have some die-hard users and dedicated folks
    adding enhancements/improvements to the language and it's
    compilers. The real question ought to be: "How big a market will
    Ada have in 10 years?" and that's a tough one to call.

    My crystal ball indicates that it will have a pretty good market!
    It already has a substantial installed base of projects & users,
    it's being used more extensively in schools - probably because of
    the availability of GNAT and the fact that you can use it to teach
    the latest programming concepts, and it is recognized in the
    industry as the way to go for large projects with high reliability
    requirements - the type of stuff that tends to hang around for a
    long time. Could it "fade away?" I suppose it's possible, but not
    likely.

    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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    "Languages don't kill people. *Programmers* do!"
        --  Rich Stewart - Language Lawyer & Language Control Opponent.
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