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I should have clarified that I meant a universal standard. COBOL was meant to create a common language across business and government, while Ada was meant to ju
by c_crank 3y ago
I should have clarified that I meant a universal standard. COBOL was meant to create a common language across business and government, while Ada was meant to just consolidate a language across DoD projects. Ada is a much better language than COBOL, but I think that adoption of even a good language across those ecosystems will only succeed when it is adopted from the ground up.
- dragonwriter 3y agoCOBOL also wasn’t a government-launched initiative, it was an industry initiative that went to the government for funding, unlike Ada which was born as a DoD initiative. If COBOL was worse for its time than Ada was for its time (which I don’t think is clear, though I’d rather work with Ada than COBOL if I had to pick one today), maybe that would support an argument about customer-need driven projects vs. vendor-imagination-driven projects.