Geert, I'll use my consultant's hat to contribute on this. My company lives from selling advice on these matters.
Notice that in the table of the referred link: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/legacy-languages-prove-lucractive-for-dying-breed-of-programmers/story-e6frgakx-1225993874788 which you point to, Cobol and Smalltalk share the same status of "Retire Now". So the Channel Register interpretation of the reports has not been that sharp at all. Also, the company issuing the report is an Aussie centered firm, as the problems we're facing in the companies around the world (in the mainframe) is more what to do with the Natural/Adabas platform, where Natural is a higher level language than Cobol but has a high impedance for conversion to Java (w/o opening the can of worms of running Java in mainframes). The FUD about Smalltalk going to become unsupported must be counteracted by the pertinent Organizations, like ESUG in Europe and STIC, and of course the Software companies themselves like VW and Instantiations. When I worked at Gartner, they had a similar table which included Smalltalk in the doom-way in "five years" ca. Y2K and recently they changed their mind a little bit: http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_driver/2008/10/09/remember-smalltalk/ and http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/11/smalltalk-is-cool-again-says-gartner/ (just a sample, Google is your friend if you're really interested). OTOH, notice that another Research company whose business is selling 'insight' says something about the primadonna du jour: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/2010/12/java-is-a-dead-end-for-enterprise-app-development/ HTH -- Cesar Rabak Em 21/02/2011 08:35, Geert Claes < [email protected] > escreveu: I just cringed when I read: "The Sydney-based Object Consulting has released a paper detailing those languages which will no longer be supported in the near future, including the likes of .NET 2.0, J2SE 1.4 and Cold Fusion (according to Object Consulting they have a three-year shelf life), while anything on Smalltalk or FoxPro should be junked or moved to a new system immediately as a result of non-support and no further development of the environments." http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/02/20/cobol_is_the_new_language_to_know/ http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/02/20/cobol_is_the_new_language_to_know/ -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Cobol-is-the-new-language-to-know-tp3317188p3317188.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
