Is Ada a commercial language ? (was: SEIC News Brief...)

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <E1u040.Ks7@thomsoft.com>, kst@aonix.com (Keith Thompson) writes:
> In <57ngcv$3c4@ns1.sw-eng.falls-church.va.us> seic@sw-eng.falls-church.va.us (SEIC) writes:
>> ADA VS. THE COMMERCIAL WORLD
>> Topic: Ada
>> 
>> John Stein Monroe reports in the latest issue of Federal Computer Week 
>> that Ada remains a vibrant language despite a smaller market share than 
>> some commercial languages.  Commercial languages are proliferating 
>> throughout the Department of Defense (DoD), but Ada is still preferred 
>> for many applications and is second only to COBOL in its use in DoD 
>> information systems.  In fact, the DoD and its contractors have developed 
>> more than 50 million lines of Ada code.
> 
> So Ada isn't a commercial language?  I doubt that my employer would agree.

For years Ada has been priced such as not to be commercially viable.
In the Microsoft Windows arena your employer has broken that trend,
but it is not yet certain whether your employer and other vendors
will "see the light" on other platforms.

Commercial acceptance requires a competitive cost-per-seat figure.
But it also requires a market awareness to include the features of
interest to customers, not all of which are from the Ada95 LRM.
I note with interest that the ACT GNAT web pages indicate the
forthcoming Alpha (only) VMS port requires VMS V7.0.  Although
I use it as a developer, I have never heard of anyone using VMS
V7.0 (yet) in production.  I know a large C-shop using VMS V5.4A
on a cluster of 9 VAX systems for development.

I realize the contract ACT got from DEC may have specified 7.0,
but if that is the basis then this certainly looks like the
civilian equivalent to DoD contracts for a compiler -- build
what one large customer specifies rather than what will be
needed by large numbers of customers.  The fact that one
will eventually be able to get access to the sources and
modify it to be compatible with VMS versions earlier than
those supported by the primary support vendor still does
not particularly encourage widespread customer acceptance.

Of course this same issue of commercial viability is why
the Aonix Windows NT offering is only on the most popular
of the three hardware platforms at present, and why even
GNAT is not scheduled to be ported to VAX/VMS.  Those
who build products for VMS just don't build them Alpha-only,
as much as DEC might like to forget it.  Even DEC doesn't.
Choosing GNAT over DEC Ada for commercial products is
just out of the question at present except for specialized
application domains which require 64-bit addressing or
kernel threads (available only on Alpha).  Choosing Ada83,
which is what DEC Ada offers, for _new_ commercial products
is unlikely.

Larry Kilgallen