Re: A scary story from the real world.

[Jerry <lanceboyle@qwest.net>]

> I mentioned Ada in connection to the Microsoft talk and the comment from
> the Microsoft person was something along the lines
>   Ada is never going to make it and I and don't believe in it.
> I wont quite since i don't remember the exact worthing.
>
> /Per

Assuming your paraphrasing is mostly accurate, the Microsoft response
is _partly_ nonsensical.

"Ada is never going to make it:" All you (Microsoft) have to do is to
start using it. "Making it" is a non-issue.

"...I don't believe in it." Aha--now we're getting somewhere. Language
choice is apparently like religion, based on a belief system. People's
choice of religion is almost always the religion in which they were
born into. It must be the same for programming languages. But religion
is inherently belief-based whereas programmers take pride in being
logical and rational. So why _do_ programmers act as though language
choice is a belief system?

I wish some smart psychologist would do research on the propagation
over decades of crappy languages as the first choice of most
programmers.

Jerry