Can Ada by popularized faster ?

[safetran <safetran@kaiwan.com>]

Yes, I do think that we can do more than we are doing. Maybe I am just
not aware of all the efforts going on and will be happy to be
enlightened.  I come across uninformed criticisms of Ada quite often and
find it irritating. Which is what prompted this post.

Other than Ada I also use C/C++ and so am quite aware of the benefits
that Ada provides. However discussions with collegues and others makes
me realise that Ada suffers from a very strong market perception as
being cumbersome, restrictive, slow, large, bulky and "that" defense
thing.

Few "amusing" encounters:
I have been asked "It must be really slow to program in Ada."  When I
asked why,  the reason given was that in Ada we have to type a lot of
words (syntax is wordy) where-as in C/C++ most of the syntax is cryptic
(and so it takes longer to program in Ada !!).

Another interesting example I found in the Slackware LINUX Unleashed
book.  This book has a section on the GNAT compiler and in it the author
states that Ada was so named as to honour one of the developers of the
language !  Check it out next time you go to the bookshop (I think it
was page 560).

For a new project I am starting I need an in-circuit emulator.  So
yesterday I called a few vendors.  One of the vendors told me that they
do not support Ada as Ada code is very slow and their engineers think
that Ada is not appropriate for embedded systems.  BTW, this is one of
the big suppliers of in-circuit emulators.

I think the Ada community needs to do something urgently to change this
market perception.  I read someplace that a DOD colonel was proposing
spending $1 million to do an advertising campaign. Is that the right way
to do this ? I don't know. I guess we need to go talk to some savvy
marketing types.  

Look at what Sun has done with Java in less than 2 years. Hardly a day
goes by without us hearing or reading something about Java. People say
that its all hype and marketing - does it really matter ? Its working
and Java is becoming popular.

Programmers and magazine articles refer to Java's elegance and strong
type checking or that it is a safer language than C/C++.  Ada has had
these since 1983. But few outside the Ada community know that.  I have
talked to C/C++ programmers who have criticised Ada because it has
strong type checking and it does not let you do "hacky" things. But then
they go ahead and praise Java for its strong type checking !!   The
level of ignorance that exists in the world about Ada, even among
experienced developers, is really quite amazing. 

One of the problems I perceive in the Ada market is that Ada tools
vendors have been quite complascent.  How many vendors have products
that compare with Microsoft VC++ or Borland C++ and at a comparable
price ?  

I am told that Ada compilers/tools should be more expensive because it
takes a lot more effort to develop an Ada compiler (than a C++ one) and
Ada compilers catch a lot more bugs thus reducing development effort and
time.  While I agree with all this,  the bottom-line is that if the
tools cost a lot more or are not as user friendly then the average
company/programmer are not going to buy them. In addition, if the Ada
tool vendors think that they have a captive market in the defense and
aerospace companies then they are not going to do a lot of marketing for
Ada. However, as we have seen it does not really pay to be complascent.

Another related problem is that there is very little press coverage of
Ada.  Most of the coverage I see is in defense oriented magazines.  It
is not common to see articles on Ada and its benefits in magazines like
Embedded Systems Programming,  EE Times etc.  C/C++ articles, and now
Java ones, dominate most pages.

A few things that we could do are:

- Improve Market Perception: Ada has a very poor market perception. We
need to do a lot more advertising of Ada's benefits as a programming
environment and language. Specially benefits as applying to the
commercial world e.g. improving time to market or lower development
costs etc. The fact that Ada can be used to do telecommunication
systems, databases, systems (OS) programming or device drivers should be
advertised.  Few people know that Ada can be used for these kinds of
applications.  A _LOT_ of people think that it is a language used only
for defense systems or only for the embedded world. There needs to be a
lot more articles in the common and technical press to increase
awareness. Another example is that very few people know that you can
convert Ada programs into Java byte codes.

- Improve Market Visibility:  Send out newsletters or mailers to
developers (like Sun does for Java) advertising the benefits of Ada and
successful Ada projects.   People say negative things about Ada and then
this becomes self feeding with more people criticizing the language
without even knowing anything about it. And while the original criticism
may have been valid its context is completely lost along the way. 
Mailers and magazine articles can be used to try and dispel some of the
negative perceptions.

- Improved Tools: Have better Ada tools from a lot more vendors - these
should be more user-friendly, conform to the current state of the art
for C++ tools and be easier to use/learn. eg the VxWorks environment for
C/C++ which integrates compilers, linkers, debuggers, in-circuit
emulators, design tools etc.  The tools should also be cheaper.

- Improved Processor Support: We need ports of GNAT as a cross-compiler
to common platforms (eg X86, Motorola 68K and PowerPC).  Maybe we could
provide a graphical, user friendly interface. Ports of GNAT to run on
(say) VxWorks, pSOS+ and other commonly used commercial real-time OSes
would also help.

- Maybe we should consider some way that Ada can be more easily
accomodated on lower end micro-controllers.  There is a huge market that
uses lower end 8 bit controllers.  And contrary to popular perception
this market is not becoming smaller as 32 bit processors become more
pervasive. Is there something we can do to target the 68HC11's, 68HC08's
etc that are out there ?  Sometimes these processors are used in safety
critical systems;  with C or C++ of course.

Is ACT or someone else in the Ada community attempting to tackle these
issues ?  

--
Rakesh