From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_20,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1479b753518e2325 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: munck@Mill-Creek-Systems.com (Bob Munck) Subject: Re: how to make Ada more popular? Date: 1999/01/23 Message-ID: <36aa1a20.51871186@news.mindspring.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 436075276 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <787hk5$q6t@drn.newsguy.com> Organization: MindSpring Enterprises X-Server-Date: 23 Jan 1999 19:30:33 GMT Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-01-23T19:30:33+00:00 List-Id: On 21 Jan 1999 07:37:41 -0800, bill_1@nospam.com wrote: > >lets face it. Ada is not used much in commerical sector. > >What can be done to improve the situation? Web server, development environment, GUI library, etc, etc. -- all technical solutions. THIS IS NOT A TECHNICAL PROBLEM!! I think most of the people reading this newsgroup will agree that Ada is technically superior to all the fad languages -- C++, Java -- for the great majority of their uses and the great majority of the institutions using them. That fact has made it somewhat successful, but much less so than those other languages. Further demonstration of that kind of superiority will have limited value. I believe that what we need is to have one or more new or existing companies use Ada to develop a large, widely- used package that is significantly better engineered and less buggy than others of its type. The company would also maintain and enhance the package through massive changes in its own features and its underlying platform. Finally, it would have to do both development and enhancement quickly and at low cost. Is this possible? I don't know. The commercial software culture seems to give us products that are "quick and dirty" throughout their entire lifecycle. They're thrown together quickly, developed and enhanced with "death march" projects, pushed through brute force testing, debugged by beta releases that are practically indistinguishable from general releases, and die a painful death when they become too kludgy to live. Companies make money with products like this only because there is a huge rate of growth in the number of new users of computers in general. They raise the money to create upgrades for their existing users by selling full packages to new users; in effect, it's a ponzi scheme. Bob Munck Mill Creek Systems LC