From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,86616b1931cbdae5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96" Subject: Re: Is Ada likely to survive ? Date: 1997/08/07 Message-ID: <97080711330013@psavax.pwfl.com> X-Deja-AN: 263199633 Sender: Ada programming language Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU X-VMS-To: SMTP%"INFO-ADA@VM1.NODAK.EDU" X-VMS-Cc: CONDIC Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-08-07T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar 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 =============================================================================== "Languages don't kill people. *Programmers* do!" -- Rich Stewart - Language Lawyer & Language Control Opponent. ===============================================================================