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Date: 25 Jun 91 22:59:24 GMT
From: cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!murtoa.cs.mu.oz.au!csv.viccol.edu.au!dougcc@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU  (Douglas Miller)
Subject: Re: How Ada is failing socially
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.175925.6730@csv.viccol.edu.au>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <SRCTRAN.91Jun24191603@world.std.com>, srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) writes:
> 
>      If Ada is so great, and the US government is spending so many billions
> on Ada software development, why is the marketplace for Ada tools and
> libraries non-existent?
>      I just received in the mail today the Summer '91 issue of "The Connection"
> a directory of software development tools and products distributed by
> "Programmers Connection (North Canton, OH) 800-336-1166)". They distribute
> pretty much any programming tool for PCs, Suns, Macs and Vaxes, though most of
> their products are for PCs.
>      The bulk of their products are language compilers, language tools and
> language libraries. In the Summer '91 issue, I made the following rough count
> of products by major languages:
> 			Ada          -       10
>  			Assembly     -       32
> 			Basic        -       65
> 			C            -      289
> 			C++	     -      111
> 			Clipper      -       38
> 			Cobol        -       15
> 			Fortran      -       53
> 			Modula-2     -       11
> 			Pascal       -       56
> 
> By product, I counted either software tools (such as metric analyzers) or
> libraries of source code (such as windowing libraries). I made similar
> counts in programming magazines (Journal of Object Oriented Programming,
> Computer Language, and Dr. Dobb's Jounral, and got similar relationships).
> 
> For some reason, the software market does not think that there is much money
> to be made with Ada products, and probably for reasons that have nothing to
> do with the technical efficiency of the language.

The key question here is how much software development is done with Ada,
compared with other languages (using an appropriate metric)?   You can't
deduce this from a straw-poll of numbers of unspecified, predominantly
PC-based "software tools" available.

On a related point, would it be true to say that Ada has built in features
that obviate the need for many auxiliary tools?  Comments anyone?

I would be more concerned about a lack of Ada compatible libraries, as one
of the objectives of Ada was to encourage a software component industry. 
Does anyone have information on relative availability of libraries for
different languages across the industry?