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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?
Date: 1997/08/06
Message-ID: <dewar.870871522@merv>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 262658038
References: <97080410223317@psavax.pwfl.com>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-08-06T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Marin says

<<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,
>>


The extraordinary thing is that this myth is actually believed by
some experienced managers as well as programmers who simply don't know.

It is of course a completely inaccurate picture. COBOL is still a very
widely used language, and is still the language of choice for developing
new information systems applications. That's not surprising, it has
features that are not duplicated in other mainstream languages such
as C++, Fortran, and Java, that are critical (interestingly Ada 95 is
the one other standardized language that *does* have the necessary
features).

New large COBOL projects are being started every day, and COBOL programmers
are in very heavy demand, made more intense by the re-engineering and
fixing up legacy systems to get through today+860 odd days.

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 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.

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).

The fact that mainframes have disappeared from your environment cannot be
extrapolated to the world at large.

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 :-)