[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.