Re: Free Hawaii trip if you buy my Ada products

[ftpbox!mothost!schbbs!news@uunet.uu.net (David Tannen)]

>    Consider for example, the current marketing wars going on in the C++
>community.  Microsoft, Borland, Centerline and Symantec are going all out
>to win market share, doing things the Ada compiler vendors will never do.

>    Meanwhile, Borland and Microsoft are offering compiler environments
>with everything in them but the kitchen sink - compilers, linkers, debuggers,
>object browsers, reuse libraries, templates, exception handling and source
>code analysis tools - integrated very well in their respective environments.
>And more than likely Borland and Microsoft will engage in their price wars
>to win market share.

Greg,

I have to agree w/ you on this one.  I had the two big compilers for the
MS-DOS world (Alsys and Meridian).  I gave up on the Meridian compiler when
my project got to "big" for their compiler to handle.  I also gave up
on Alsys when it became apparent that they were not going to move to
MS-Windows.  This is after spending +$1500 on Ada compilers and tools.
Now I use Borland Object Pascal (w/ tools cost < $600).  If you only 
compare the languages Ada is a better language IMO.  But if you compare 
working environments and everything you get w/ BP v7.0, BP is a worlds 
ahead of the Alsys/Meridian environments (see Greg's list of features).

As for productivity - I am about 300% more productive using BP than
I ever was w/ Alsys.  I am working on a product that I tried to 1st
develop in Ada.  I gave up after about 18 months.  In the 6 months
since I got BP I am farther along and will be releasing the product
late this Fall.  

Its just a niche product (my product), but there are thousands of
software engineers who are developing niche products in everything
but Ada.  Why?  Better, cheaper tools.

After 6 months of listening to Greg, I am becoming more and more
convinced that the Mandate was a good idea @ one time; but now it
needs to be dropped or seriously modified.  If the mandate is good
enought for DoD, why not DOE, DoL, etc?  Let the vendors compete 
with Borland/Microsoft/gcc/etc in a free and open market.  Maybe then
they will have to product some tools worth buying.  

Any vendors want to respond?  Why do your tools cost so much?  Why
don't they compare w/ equivalent C++/Smalltalk/Object Pascal 
environments for MS-DOS (I don't know as much about tool costs in
the Unix world)?

Just my $0.02.

---
David Tannen
tannend@source.asset.com
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-- "Dependance on wizardry to mitigate the fundamental limitations
--  of software is called 'hacking'."  Grady Booch.
--
-- Developing MS-Windows applications often requires 'wizardry'.
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