[Info-vax] DIBOL-11

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 3/11/2023 9:17 AM, bill wrote:
> On 3/11/2023 1:24 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 3/10/2023 7:15 PM, Chris Townley wrote:
>>> On 10/03/2023 23:56, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>> They had Cobol, Basic and PL/I among what I would
>>>> call clearly business oriented languages plus Pascal,
>>>> Fortran and Ada  that also sometimes was used for
>>>> such programming.
>>>>
>>>> But I am not so surprised they wanted Dibol as well.
>>>> There tend to always be a pretty broad palette of
>>>> programming languages for such general purpose.
>>>> Different domains, different developer preferences
>>>> etc. tend to steer towards many programming languages.
>>>> Having 4 or 7 languages does not seem
>>>> excessive to me.
>>>>
>>>> If someone wanted to start such an application today,
>>>> then they would have even more choices. Java, Scala, Kotlin,
>>>> Groovy, C#, VB.NET, PHP and Python are definitely used for such
>>>> plus C, C++ and Go are also used for such.
>>>
>>> I am sure you could add a few more...
>>
>> But why would you want to ??
> 
> And the really big difference is function and purpose.
> COBOL, DIBOL, Fortran, BASIC, Pascal and RPG were domain
> specific languages.  (I should mention here that two of
> those languages were frequently used outside their domain and maybe that 
> contributed to the later demise of domain specific languages.)
> Never really sure why PL/I came about but that's IBM. :-)
> All of the languages listed in the "today" list a general purpose
> and not targeted at any particular problem.  I guess it comes
> back to the efficiency question that I used to I used to raise
> with my academic peers.  I always said efficiency was still important
> while they insisted, "Why bother.  Just throw more hardware at the
> problem."

I split the today languages in two groups for a reason.

Because they are not truly general.

The first group of languages are the languages geared
towards let us call it "server side business
applications". That label is way broader and
more diverse than "business computing" of the past,
but still the languages would be unsuitable for
writing an OS or writing embedded real time code. Some of
them are used client side (C# and VB.NET for Windows desktop
apps, Java and Kotlin for Android apps).

The second group are the languages geared towards
the platform stuff and just happen to be used/misused
for business applications.

Arne