[dragonwriter]

> The last time the government tried to set a computing language standard, we got COBOL,

Ada, actually (well, that might not be the last time, but it is certainly much more recent than COBOL.) COBOL and JOVIAL were roughly concurrent – both efforts started in 1959, I believe – but the effort that culminated in Ada started in the mid-1970s.

[c_crank]

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]

COBOL 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.