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From: Dave Wood <dpw@sd.aonix.com>
Subject: Re: Can Ada by popularized faster ?
Date: 1997/10/25
Message-ID: <3451A98F.B3DFF971@sd.aonix.com>#1/1
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References: <3446D9AB.3A14@erols.com>
Organization: Aonix
Reply-To: dpw@sd.aonix.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-10-25T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


William A Whitaker wrote:
> 
> 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).

This seems easy to counter-argue.  Here are a couple
of examples:

1. Mac OS was written in Pascal.  Even in the Mac heyday,
Pascal was never commercially popular.

2. The UCSD P-System (eh? universal byte code??) was
written in Pascal and clearly was ahead of its
time.  See above, re: Pascal.  (For further irony,
some out there will realize that the head of the
company that was trying to commercialize this
proto-Java technology is now the CEO of a certain 
supplier of reasonably popular Ada 95 tools.)

3. VMS was written in (I think) BLISS.  VAX/VMS was
quite dominant for a time.  Who the hell has ever
heard of or cared about BLISS on any significant
level?

4. The AmigaOS was written in (I think) B, or BPL,
or something like that.  The OS was quite wonderful
and well ahead of its time as a desktop OS.  Didn't 
do much for the underlying language, though.

No, I rather think what made C popular was not the
fact that Unix was written in it, per se, but
rather that Unix and C were free and further that
they were widely used in academia.  C appeals to
bitheads, hackers, and (dubious) academics, who
after all are the dominant computing species 
almost by definition.  Being part of an open system
and surrounded by all those little hacker tools
with cute bithead names (awk!!) oddly enough
helped rather than hurt.  Perfect combination
to flourish in an academic environment.

Ada will never be C because, well, Ada is not C.  
It shares C's power and utility, but not its
essential bithead/ hacker characteristics.  On
the other hand, Ada's essential characteristics
can provide a competitive edge to the brave and
wise minority who choose to use it.

I don't think that's such a bad thing.  

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