Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
news:40729B9D.30906@noplace.com...
> You can't really mean that, can you? Luck is the only thing that makes
> anybody or anything successful? Babe Ruth was just lucky and it didn't
> have anything to do with skill & practice? Henry Ford just tripped over
> a car one day and got filthy rich without creativity and hard work?
> Thomas Edison's light bulb caught on & became popular because it was
> crap with a good marketing plan?

Of course, hard work is needed as a pre-requisite. But success itself (the
sort of mass-market success that we're talking about here) is a matter of
luck. For every Babe Ruth, there's plenty of other players that never got
the right chance. Henry Ford was one out of several hundred automobile
manufacturers. I'm sure most of them worked very hard. And so on.
Supposedly, another inventor submitted a patent application for the
telephone 6 *hours* after Alexander Graham Bell's was submitted. I'm sure
both of them worked hard, but only one got any of the success.

There were thousands of people and companies who worked hard in the early PC
computer business. (I knew a number of them.) Only a few had any real
success. (I didn't know any of them. :-)

...
> Ada, OTOH, identified (and still does) a relatively *small* market niche
> - embedded/realtime & now large/long-lived/high-reliability systems.

Bullpucky. *Ada* (not some company or implementation) is a general-purpose
programming language. Nothing more and nothing less. Embedded systems were
never more that a few percent of RRS's revenues; we've always marketed to
general programming. "Ada" doesn't identify markets; it's simply a thick
book. Vendors do that, and no one can or should tell them what to do.

As far as the rest of your troll, your conclusion is that Ada needs a $100
million markover -- which is clearly not going to happen. So why do you
bother hanging out here and waste the rest of our time with it? You must do
it just to get attention - I'd suggest that kidnapping yourself would be
more effective (a la Audrey Seiler).

                    Randy.