Re: of possible interest

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Georg Bauhaus writes:
> On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 21:26 +0200, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>> Quite interesting indeed.  For embedded software, Aonix are promoting
>> a new, unproven, proprietary development and run-time environment
>> derived from Java,
>
> I'd not be so sure about this. If you actually look at the
> things Aonix offers under the heading "Java", you will notice
> a number of familiar items. One has the qualification Raven,
> for a start...
>
> The "Java" has @AnnoTations that let me speculate they do use
> their Ada experience to build something that is more marketable
> yet incorporates lots of Ada, and possibly more, even when
> this is not syntactically apparent.

I haven't found these on the FAQ, but you make it sound like they've
actually "embraced and extended" the Java language. If that's the case,
then I can only conclude they've partly fallen into the trap of "yet
another language" which the paper criticised.

> >  a notoriously unsafe language,
>
> They don't just use Java, really, considering names like
> @StaticallyAnalyzable in their language. An ahead-of-time
> compiler is not the same thing as a JIT, either.
>
> >  while at the same
> > time admitting that Ada has been just fine for these environments for
> > 23 years.
>
> I'm curious whether there isn't a financial incentive: The J-word
> sells much better than the A-word, so how do we find a compromise
> between {}s and language rigor, for display software of smartphones
> or ticket machines, etc.

Of course there is a financial incentive.  That was precisely the cause
of my ire: they seem to be favouring marketing over engineering. They
have an aura as a provider of top-of-the-line technology for
top-of-the-line embedded systems. They could use that aura to persuade
the masses to use good Software Engineering tools. Instead, they
promote Java-based tools. By doing this, they might gain customers, but
they've lost their aura and soul. They encourage businesses to hire
Java coders instead of software engineers and to lower their standards.

Besides, what are they hoping? Do they really want to compete against
hordes of Java "me-too" tool providers?

> I also do not understand your qualification of the "development and
> run-time environment derived from Java". It's Eclipse AFAICT, so
> neither exactly unproven nor totally black-box-proprietary stuff,
> seen from a Java perspective.

The compiler, precompiled libraries and virtual machine are
proprietary. I see they offer a "source code license", though. Probably
quite expensive, but my main gripe is that it still violates Freedoms 2
and 3.

They seem to be trying to get their "extensions" to the language into a
standard. That's good, but in the mean time, if you use these
"extensions" in your programs, you risk becoming a captive customer
anyway. What good is a standard if only one vendor supports it?

> OTOH, what's the effect of 'Img on Ada?

Do you mean that AdaCore is guilty of "embracing and extending", too?
Yes, that's true, but they also provide pragma Extensions_Allowed, so
they can be forgiven :) Moreover, contrary to Java, Ada is quite
suitable for embedded Software Engineering even without  any
extensions.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.