Re: Can Ada by popularized faster ?

[Dave Wood <dpw@sd.aonix.com>]

I find your letter interesting in that it provides an eclectic
mix of accurate deductions, naive assumptions, positive
spirit, and nascent defeatism.  It's probably a decent 
microcosm of the "Ada community"!  I have a few comments to
contribute.

safetran wrote:
> 
> 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.

In my estimation, the situation of Ada today is a combination of
(a) federal ineptitude, (b) corporate lack of foresight, and (c) really
unfortunate timing.  The federal ineptitude is probably clear
enough to everyone - well-meaning but poorly considered mandates
and porkbarrel funding initiatives of the '80s.  The corporate
lack of foresight speaks to the feeding frenzy resulting from (a).
There were so many lucrative, poorly planned, and ineptly managed
Ada programs that how could the Ada contractors/ vendors help
but to take part, rather than to work at building a solid 
infrastructure for long-term growth and health?  The result
was a pretty dismal early legacy of big, slow, and non-competitive
compilers and tools.  This is pretty much all behind us, of course,
but bad reputations are hard to shake.

Unfortunate timing?  Well, from around 1992 to 1996 the Ada suppliers
not only had to shake the early reputation, they also had to deal
with the end of the cold war, followed by contraction of their
primary core market, followed by a wave of consolidations and
mergers, followed by the extraordinarily painful transition to
a whole new language standard and consequent technology shift,
coincident with the relentless rise of C/C++, the meteoric
hype of Java, the continuing plunge of compiler prices, and
the intense "feature-creep" pressure of compilers from people
like Microsoft and Borland.  This is an awful lot, I think you 
will agree, with which to contend.  Enlightening the ignorant 
C/ C++ masses takes a back seat to simple survival under such 
circumstances.

Ah, but 1997 and 1998 are a different story...

[typical "outsider" misperceptions snipped]

> 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.

I'm a marketing type, I don't know about savvy.

I will tell you that a $1 million marketing budget would be
a pretty good start for convincing those who are already 
convinced.

I would welcome a $1,000,000 marketing  budget as an excellent 
step for me to work at taking market share from other Ada 
suppliers.

However, it wouldn't begin to make the slightest dent in 
terms of having Ada break into the non-Ada sector.

[To be sure, we do have C/C++ people switching to Ada from time
to time.  However, I don't think a minor league marketing 
campaign would have an effect on this trend.  These people
just happen to be unusually smart.]

> 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.

Ah, now there's an example of really *excellent* timing.  Combined
with interesting technology, frothy media hype thanks to the web
connection, and belated but extreme marketing efforts by a lot of
really huge companies, this is a potent force.  This is an almost
surreal combination of lucky factors and it would be pure pipe dream
to imagine that lighting could strike twice at this level.

 
> 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.

But of course technical merit has very little correlation to 
market success.

> 
> One of the problems I perceive in the Ada market is that Ada tools
> vendors have been quite complascent.  

Many of us working 12 hour days will take exception to this 
perception.  :-(


> How many vendors have products
> that compare with Microsoft VC++ or Borland C++ and at a comparable
> price ?

I can think of one, and their name (unchanged for nearly a year
now) starts with an A, ends with an X, and has ONI in the middle.

 
> 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.

Personally, I don't buy the notion that Ada development environments
cost *that* much more to develop (compared to, say, C++), especially
once the core technology is in place.  This was more of an issue in
the early days.  In any event, this is not the primary price driver.

A better reason for Ada compilers to be more expensive is that the
market is smaller.

Microsoft will move about two orders of magnitude greater of C++
compilers than all the Ada vendors put together.  You do the math.

Another way to look at it is this:  what Microsoft does with their
pricing is simple for them.  By comparison, what the Ada vendors
do (well, some of them, at any rate) is nothing short of heroic.
Or maybe suicidal. :-)  By this measure, *Microsoft* is complacent.
The difference is they can get away with it.
 
> 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.

Please write some articles, by all means.

Previously on this forum I've offered to provide free development
environments to those who propose publishing important and relevant
articles or books, or working to develop freely available 
software demonstrating how great Ada can be.  I don't have any
takers yet.

 
> A few things that we could do are:
> 
> - Improve Market Perception: Ada has a very poor market perception. 

The very best thing that people can do is to build a lot of
successful Ada applications.  Nothing speaks as loudly as
success.  


> - 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.

This is an interesting juxtaposition of concepts.  On the one hand, 
you want GNAT (free) solutions all over the place.  On the other hand,
you want "more vendors" in the Ada business, providing tools that 
"should also be cheaper".

The cost of entry into the Ada business is very high.  Indeed, the
cost of *staying* in is high.  How many new vendors will be 
enticed into such a market with a pervasive and entrenched freeware
solution to compete against?

I have often stated that GNAT is a net good thing for the Ada 
community, but to be fair, I feel confident saying so because
I feel strongly that my products are so good that their market
share is safe against GNAT, so long as we continue to work hard
to extend our advantages and eliminate our deficiencies.  On the 
other hand, if I wasn't already in the business, I'd be hard pressed 
to justify getting into it at this point.

If your definition of a strong Ada situation is that there should
be several healthy, growing, and self-investing independent 
vendors actively supplying the market, the best thing you can 
do is to support those vendors by buying their products

-- Dave Wood
-- Product Manager, ObjectAda for Windows
-- Aonix - "We don' need no steeenking mandate!"
-- http://www.aonix.com