Comment Re:ADA? (Score 1) 267
COBOL is an excellent example
Is it? How come I never see job ads for COBOL programmers? I know no one who uses it. I have often heard that it is used in "banks" or for "business" programming. But I know several people that work as programmers at banks, and none of them use COBOL or are aware of it being used at all. They are all Java shops. Same for programmers writing business logic. So I think that all these myths about demand for COBOL programmers is a load of hogwash.
Perhaps ADA would be another example?
Ada was oversold in the 1980s, and quickly developed a reputation for poor performance, and heavy resource requirements. Few systems were written in it, and even mission critical military systems (which Ada was designed for) could commonly get an exemption to use something more sensible.
In my current city there is a company that writes software for mortgage companies. Their back end systems were all written in COBOL. They pay a small fortune for experienced COBOL developers, but they are transitioning all of their code over to Java. I also worked on a project for the Department of Defense that was originally written in Fortan, then had new code added as ADA and my company at that time worked to convert all the ADA and Fortran to C. That was about 6 years ago, though.