Thirty years ago I wrote a proposal for using lisp for a distributed control system project.
Hi Dar,
Thirty years ago I was responsible for procurement and development of Oakland Police Department's MIS. While the City of Oakland DP Dept. was a COBOL shop, Boeing Computer Systems had just delivered OPD's Computer Assisted Dispatching System in FORTRAN, and the daily CAD activity logs were the principal input to MIS; so MIS was written in FORTRAN.
A year or so after I left OPD, they hired Coopers & Lybrand (sp?) to review the system. Their main criticism was the selection of the programming language: "FORTRAN" is for scientific programming and COBOL is for business programming." Of course no mention of the CAD system, Boeing's choice of FORTRAN, or the need for OPD to maintain in-house FORTRAN expertise to support CAD.
Their "analysis" also stated, "There are more COBOL programmers than FORTRAN programmers; so it will be easier to find programming staff." Real world: when I added a programmer to my staff, both candidates sent me by City Personnel were FORTRAN programmers recently hired by City DP and scheduled to be trained in COBOL.
The MIS system was used daily for over 15 years. What "everybody knows" is often nada.
--
Rob Cozens CCW, Serendipity Software Company http://www.oenolog.net/who.htm
"And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three; Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee."
from "The Triple Foole" by John Donne (1572-1631) _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
