Re: Creating markets + converting my employer

[tmoran@bix.com]

In Re: converting my employer to Ada?, Frank Manning says
> I wonder if we're trying to sell Ada to the wrong people -- that is,
> programmers. Maybe we need to go over their heads and bend the ears
> of the people in power.
Sounds good to me.  The employer more commonly tells the programmer what
language to use (if only by hiring 'experienced C++ programmer') than
vice versa.  I would argue more for the robustness of Ada programs than
their readability by non-programmers - a few 'limited private' and
'generic' words will convince anyone that the Ada program is not so
readable.  And some managers can code simple things in C, making them
think they can understand any C* program.  Lastly, any manager looking
at the classifieds can see that he won't have any problems finding a
cheap, replaceable, C programmer - can he be as confident about Ada?
  Marketing a language is as much a psychological or sociological
undertaking as a technical or 'price of compiler' one.  I believe part
of C's success was its presentation as the elite language of Bell Labs,
rather than the Fortran or Cobol of the unwashed.  It was 'cool'.  Ada
9X should be presented as the language of the new 'power elite'.  We
don't need people ignorant of software engineering hacking CAda just
because the compiler was cheap.  C was fine for small systems that could
crash with little damage.  Everyone agrees that it's obsolete for large
systems.  People are just starting to find out that replacing a C
compiler with a C++ one will not solve the problem, but they need to
know that Ada exists, has a proven history of getting large jobs done,
and that they needn't be dependent on rare, high priced wizards for
competent Ada programming.