[Info-vax] Most popular application programming languages on VMS ?

[Scott Dorsey]

Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>Don't forget Ada.  The VAX running VMS had one of the
>first validated compilers and saw use pretty much from
>the very first VAX to hit the streets.  I saw it in the
>very early 80's.

Well, there's the thing.
Ada was very popular on the vax.  Really, it was the other way around, if
you wanted Ada, you bought a vax to run it because the vax compiler was
good.  But, most of those Ada applications have long left VMS and gone 
elsewhere.

Likewise, Fortran was very very popular on the vax.  Lots of people in
the scientific computing community used the vax and alpha machines because
they had a lot of CPU for the dollar, and there were a lot of coprocessors
available from outfits like FPS and Mercury to make your fortran code run
faster.  But those people all left VMS by the mid-nineties in search of
ever more CPU, and for the most part they took their Fortran code with them.

In 1988 the vax was our departmental computer and we had a large array of
programming languages for it.  We even had xlisp and forth.  The people using
that stuff were the first to move off to Sun workstations.

So, the programming language mix today is likely very different than it
was in 1990, because the stuff that was very portable is all gone.
My guess is that most of what is left are commercial applications in
languages appropriate for that.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."