Re: is ada dead?

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <l8g0c5nomd.fsf@berlin.int.act-europe.fr>, Emmanuel Briot says...
>
>dead. However, as the co-author of several big packages that were released as
>open-source projects (GtkAda, GVD, XML/Ada, ada-mode for Emacs), I am sorry to
>say that we do not get a lot of patches (certainly less that equivalent C
>projects do).  We do fully appreciate the bug reports, and the few suggestions
>for enhancements, but that doesn't increase the time we have to develop the
>projects!
>
>I don't know if this is related to the size of the Ada community, or simply a
>lack of a free-software culture in this Ada world, but it would certainly seem
>like the first nice step forward (contributing to existing Ada projects).
>There is also AWS, OpenToken, AdaOS,... so there's probably already something
>you might be interested in and where your knowledge would be much appreciated.
>It would be interesting to know from the authors of the other packages whether
>they get patches or not.

I actually have 4 free software projects right now: Fodderbot and AdaClips (both
inactive), and OpenToken, and the SETI@Home Service. 

Fodderbot (an expert system for playing Empire) never seemed to get much
interest from anyone. That was OK, as it was really just a school project
anyway. The market it was directed towards already had lots of (better) scripts
available to do what it does, so its understandable that no-one got real
interested in it just because it was "AI".

AdaClips (Ada interface to CLIPS expert system shell) I believe garnered me all
of 2 emails of the "Cool! I needed that" variety. No-one ever submitted
anything. But then it was marked as "inactive" the day I released it, so there
wasn't a lot of incentive I guess.

OpenToken received quite a bit of interest, and has had 2 major contributors
other than myself. Probably up near a quarter of the code in it was submitted by
users, and I have received numerous "patches" or bugfixes.

The SETI@Home service seems to have loads of users (I really need to put a hit
counter on my page). I understand there is even a mirror somewhere in europe. I
get oodles of email from users, but the vast majority of it is from
non-programmers. Most of the rest is feature requests. In the 7 months since its
release, I think I've had one user dive into the sources to pinpoint a problem
for me. I've never had any sources submitted. But then, reliability is one of
its prime goals. It has only had about 3 bugs discovered since inception (and
none were fatal). So perhaps there just hasn't been the need.

But I suspect the reason for the big difference in participation between
OpenToken and SETI_Service is just the nature of the two projects. Anyone using
OpenToken is going to be a programmer, while very few users of SETI_Service seem
to be. Also, OpenToken is designed to be incredibly modular and extendable,
which means it is routine for people to develop their own additional
functionality. The only decision is whether to contribute that back or not. The
SETI@Home Service really only has one small job to do. I try to encourage people
online to add their pet features to the SETI_Service sources, but so far I don't
seem to have had any takers (perhaps I have, but they haven't told me about it).
To do so would require reading through my sources, figuring out what they do,
then modifying them. Adding to OpenToken is simply a matter of making your own
package and extending the appropriate tagged type.

So if there is a lesson to derive from all this mess :-), perhaps it is that the
best way to encourage contributions is to make your project as easily and
modularly extensible as possible. It would be interesting to see a more
controlled study of this theory.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
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