sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) (01/02/90)
The vote for comp.lang.cobol is over. It will not be created for two reasons: - Too little interest, only 95 persons voted in favour, so even with no NO votes, I wouldn't have got the required 100 vote majority. - Too strong opposition, 54 votes were against, which means that also the other criterion, at least 2/3 of the votes in favour, wasn't met. Since the group failed, I will not waste bandwidth with posting the voters. I haven't checked for duplicates and other misses, but with the clear result, there's no need too. And, don't write to me get a list of voters, I will delete the mailboxes just when I've written this article. There was a suggestion to form alt.cobol. Some of the YES voters seemed to be quite anxious in having a Cobol group, so there might be an idea to pursue that idea. I will not create it, though. I wasn't so surprised by the low interest, possibly I had expected to get some more votes. What was news to me was the strong opposition. Most voters just gave a YES or a NO (which I appreciate, saves disk space) so I can only guess, but somehow I feel that there were two reasons: - No traffic justifying the group. - Cobol is a ugly language and shouldn't be encouraged with a newsgroup. While I have no problem with the first argument, the other sentiment makes me a little puzzled. First of all the argument seems slightly invalid. In those terms, comp.lang.cobol has a precedent in comp.lang.c, so what's the issue? Second, and more important, the quality of the language has of course nothing to do with whether it should have a newsgroup. Anyway, that is of no interest now. Unless someone create alt.cobol, Cobol postings has to continue to go to comp.lang.misc. Finally, thanks to everyone who voted. -- Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se Unix is a virus.