OT: This Swift thing

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.10851.1402154030.18130.python-list at python.org>,
 Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 07 Jun 2014 08:52:36 -0400, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> declaimed the
> following:
> 
> 
> >You are lucky indeed.  Trust me, in big companies, technical decisions 
> >are often made by people who are not using the technology.
> 
> 	Or influenced by someone familiar with some tech and having a big
> ego...
> 
> 	Many years ago, in a company to remain nameless, I was in a department
> with ~130 programmers distributed among 3-4 main subsystems (batch analysis
> [aka, post-processing of the daily tapes], planning [generating the
> schedule for the next day], and real-time [operations using the schedule]).
> The real-time group was 15-30 people using Macro-11 (PDP-11s if that dates
> things). The rest of the department was pretty much all skilled VAX
> FORTRAN-77.
> 
> 	The time came to port real-time from PDP-11 to a VAX system. A small
> study was performed to determine what language would be used. Very small
> study -- I think it was restricted to the 30 RT folks; I only learned of
> the result after a choice had been made.
> 
> 	The candidates: VAX-11 Assembly, F77, C, Pascal.

What was wrong with just running the original pdp-11 binaries on the VAX 
in compatibility mode? :-)