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=0.1 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_05,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no 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: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Is Ada likely to survive ? Date: 1997/08/10 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 263506789 References: <97080711330013@psavax.pwfl.com> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-08-10T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Marin says 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 There is no secret to where IBM's money comes from -- just take the time to do some research -- in fact all the material is available on the Web! Take the time sometime, you will clearly find it illuminating. 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. Yes, this migration is going on, but as everyone involved in the IS industry is very much aware, the idea that mainframes can be easily replaced by client server models has turned out to be an illusion. It is possible that UTC is indeed atypical. It is certain that your ideas do not match the larger picture. So, if you are accurate in your assessment of UTC (often I find that engineers in companies have zero idea about what is going on in the IS side of the house), then I would guess that this is the only possible explanation. As I said - I'm not saying "gone" just dramatically declined. No, noone has seen the expected dramatic decline. You have to look in the second deriviative to see any decline at all. And even there the figures are surprising. You are making claims that simply cannot be substantiated except by wishful thinking. Incidentally, it is the case that the IBM share of the world wide mainframe market (which is itself growing) is declining, so for a real picture of the whole mainframe market you need to look at more than IBM, and in particular, the Japanese mainframe companies have been doing very well recently. 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. The difference between COBOL (Ada people should try to spell languages correctly :-) and Algol is that it has a much bigger share of the market. It is the most widely used language in the DoD today, and is the target of choice for most 4GL's. Many new applications are being developed every day in COBOL. Some engineering and technical people imagine that obviously C++ could be used in place of COBOL, but the fact of the matter is that the COBOL infrastructure (i.e. COBOL + CICS + all sorts of other stuff provides an environment for IS development that is not easily matched by any other language). Ada provides some of the basic features, but still needs a lot building around it to make it competitive with COBOL for this application area. The kind of pronouncements that Marin is making are very common among technical engineers who know very little about the IS market. One of the problems in this field is that there is a huge barrier between the IS and non-IS sides of the house at all levels (most CS professors know nothing at all about IS development, and it is really a rather shocking gap, given the importance of this area). Similarly, I often meet engineers who actually think that all the world uses Unix or NT, and think that COBOL has died out. Just yesterday, I was talking to someone in the DoD who thought that DoD was behind commercial industry because it still used COBOL extensively, and he assumed that the rest of the non-DoD world had abandoned it.