🚀 go-pugleaf

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.