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Date: 25 May 93 02:26:46 GMT
From: seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net  (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: verdix kisses off Ada
Message-ID: <1993May25.022646.25761@seas.gwu.edu>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <1993May24.181812.5019@hemlock.cray.com> gbt@cray.com (Greg Titus) w
rites:
>
[...]

>The point we have been hearing so often in this discussion is that the
>vendors, for whatever reason(s), did not undertake certain strategies
>that would have increased the demand for Ada.  Now it appears that at
>least one of them is attempting to expand into a market that exists
>precisely because some other entity (Bell+Berkeley) did undertake
>those strategies (for UNIX and C).
>

[...]

Don't forget DoD, in the form of ARPA (DARPA, whatever it was called
then) which funded most of Berkeley's UNIX development. At that time,
at least parts of the DoD seemed to know how to seed the right kind of
R&D, to get it to the point where it could be easily commercialized.
One of the Berkeley developers at the time was a grad student called
Bill Joy, whose name might ring a bell. He was one of the founders of
Sun, the first company to put Berkeley UNIX into wide commercial
application. UNIX was going nowhere commercially till then.

And don't forget that DARPA also sponsored X up at MIT.

For all that the early SETL releases of Ada/Ed got flamed for poor 
performance, they were never supposed to perform well. The Army's
funding of that project showed Ada's implementability and provided
a testbed for the early ACVC. The C version of Ada/Ed, finally
released for ftp in 1992, is a decent performer that's making a dent
"out there" in the schools.

Compare that with the way the services funded ALS and AIE, which were 
overtaken by events by the time they appeared. I've heard many
explanations for the failure of those projects; I'll leave it to
others to post their perceptions if they choose to do so.

In funding GNAT, DoD, now in the form of the Ada9x office, is going
back to the DARPA/Berkeley or Army/NYU or DARPA/MIT approach.
Let's hope the approach is vindicated again. I think it will be.

Not to put too fine a point on it, those of you who think that
universities are full of nothing but fuzzy-headed academics can
think about these DoD-funded university success stories a while.

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman
co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee

Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
(202) 994-5253 (voice)
(202) 994-5296 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

"The most important thing is to be sincere, 
and once you've learned how to fake that, you've got it made." 
-- old show-business adage
------------------------------------------------------------------------