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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?
Date: 1997/08/17
Message-ID: <dewar.871840197@merv>#1/1
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References: <33D005F2.E5DCD710@kaiwan.com>
 <5qp3cf$aqc$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
 <01bc977a$adaf91a0$8cb45ec3@newart.artel.it>
 <5rrtlt$i99$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <dewar.870524681@merv>
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 <5t67ti$5qf$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1
Date: 1997-08-17T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


<<Multics was not "pretty much a failure", though it was a bit slow
getting off the ground.>>

Tell that to the stockholders! Multics most certainly was a failure. And
indeed the aftermath of that failure had a very significant effect, 
particularly at Bell.

Sure, from a technical point of view, Multics was a fine system (note
that the designers of Ada were multics based in the early Ada days,
and the required Ada simulator was written for Multics, as well as
the early Alsys bootstrap processor).

However, it was a commercial failure.

PL/1 is a similar story. Sure it is not dead (I still think that you
are providing very weak examples, there are cases, not many, but some,
of major companies doing commercial software in PL/1). Still, given
the IBM intention that the language would effectively replace COBOL
and Fortran, it must be considered a huge failure (and indeed is
so-regarded by IBM these days -- that does not mean they will abandon
it, no more than they will abandon OS/2, which is also a failure in
terms of the plans, even though it was a technical succcess, and is
still in wide use).