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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/8/2019 8:19 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> All this talk about programming languages has made me wonder what
> the most popular application programming languages are on VMS, both
> today and in the past.
> 
> Since the language options are going to vary with application type
> (you are not going to see a lot of scientific programming in COBOL
> for example :-)), this is across the VMS base as a whole and not
> across one specific section of it.
> 
> Does anyone know the answer ?

I don't.

HPE/VSI may have a clue based on licenses sold.

But we can guess.

Approach #1:

import random

lang = [ 'Fortran', 'Cobol', 'Basic', 'Pascal', 'C', 'C++' ]
random.shuffle(lang)
for i in range(len(lang)):
     print('%d - %s' % (i + 1, lang[i]))

:-)

Approach #2:

I will start by distinguishing between:
* Languages for primary applications (applications directly supporting
   the organizations main purpose)
* Languages for supporting applications (applications supporting
   The primary applications – integrations, web front ends, operation
   automation etc.)

Languages for primary applications.

Based on VSI priorities and previous owners actions it seems like 
Fortran, Cobol, Basic, Pascal and C are more used than C++, Ada and
PL/I.

Based on my subjective impressions from here it seems like Fortran,
Cobol and C are more used than Basic and Pascal.

That leads to the following 3 tiers:

Tier 1 = Fortran, Cobol, C
Tier 2 = Basic, Pascal
Tier 3 = C++, Ada, PL/I

Languages for supporting applications (excluding languages
also used for primary applications).

There is no doubt that a lot of DCL is used many places. The fact that
DCL is not suited or intended for creating large applications has not
prevented people from writing large DCL scripts to do stuff.

HP(E) and VSI have prioritized Java, so there must definitely be
some usage. I suspect though that Java usage on VMS is mostly for
supporting applications and not for primary applications.

Based on my subjective impressions from here it seems like Python is
also quite popular in the VMS world.

The support/interest for PHP and  Perl seems more limited.

That leads to the following 3 tiers:

Tier 1 = DCL
Tier 2 = Java, Python
Tier 3 = PHP, Perl

And if you think the above is pure speculation then you are right – and 
you may try approach #1 instead.

  :-) :-) :-)

Arne