Re: Can Ada by popularized faster ?

[William A Whitaker <whitaker@erols.com>]

Somewhere on this thread someone suggested that Ada needed a "killer
application" and that an operating system would be a case in point (like
C -> UNIX).

In the mid 80's Steve Squires promised (in writing) to have the
second/production phase of the CMU MACH OS done in Ada, in line with
DARPA's responsibility under the DoD direction.  This was then to be the
end all of operating systems and the world would beat a path to its/out
door.

I do not know the details, I suppose that CMU just could not be bothered
and DARPA folded over the matter.  (The alternative is that Steve was a
disremembering bureaucrat ten years before it was popular I refuse to
entertain!)

And in the end, MACH was not the killer application it was supposed to
be (unless it killed Next).

I just wanted to remind the group of that little bit of history.

Whitaker