Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Harry says

<<From my obsolete or dying list: ALGOL 60, ALGOL 68, PL/I, APL, SNOBOL,
Pascal, CLU, Modula-2, Modula-3, JOVIAL, Prolog, Smalltalk-80.  I'm sure
some people will beg to differ.
>>


Well people sure have strange lists.

Algol-60 comes closest to meeting my criteria. It was never standardized,
but Algol-60 Modified was standardized 20 years later (I was involved in
this effort as the chair of WG2.1), but at the time it was standardized,
it was really absurdly late.

Algol-68 was never successful, it was never standardized, it was never
widely used. The nearest that it came to serious use was Algol-68R at
RRE, but despite Ian's best efforts, A68 waws never really a contender,
and there were very few compilers completed. It was a sad case of a
language that was more or less DOA. (I was chair of the A68 mainteance
committee for a number of years, so I know this history well).

PL/I is still widely used, and in fact IBM just released a new
implementation (for the PC I think). Putting this on the list presumably
means nothing more than that you personally think it is obsolete, but
that is not what we are talking about here.

APL is widely used, particularly by accountants, that again is another
blind spot.

SNOBOL (more specifically SPITBOL, which as you probably know I created),
is amazingly alive. I can tell you all sorts of interesting projects that
are using it. One of the most interesting is a project for creating
dictionaries of native American dialects -- a race against time, since
some of these dialects, unlike SNOBOL, are definitely dieing.

Pascal is very much alive, please go to the borland home page to find
out about many interesting projects using Delphi (which is one of
the nicest development environments around). According to Bill Gates,
Delphi has about 5% of the PC development market (Jean Ichbiah, the
original designer of Ada, has used Delphi for his new PC based product).

CLU was never anything other than a research language on my radar screen,
so never really alive in the sense we are talking about. Modula also comes
close to this categorization, well it has been used widely in teaching,
but it has never had a significant commercial penetration as far as I
know, but no doubt there are counter exmaples.

Jovial probably comes closest to having a legitimate place on your list.
It was of course never in wide general use, though it was used on a lot
of military projects, and is consequently still in use today, but over
the long run, I agree it is likely to give way to alternatives.

Prolog is still about as heavily used as it ever was. The only significant
commercial use I am aware of is in connection with AI projects, and in
particular it was the language adopted by the 5th generation project,
and is still widely used in connection with projects stemming from that
MITI effort.

Smalltalk is of course in very wide use, it is seen as a much more
viable contender than C++ by much of the information systems industry
(personally the idea of building giant programs, of millions of lines,
in Smalltalk sounds a bit frightening :-)