Re: Suitability for small Windows projects

[Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com>]

"Tarjei T. Jensen" wrote:

> No reason to be surprised. Nobody in the Ada community except Richard Riehle
> writes about Ada anywhere. You would probably have to threaten people with
> serious physical injury in order to get them to write articles that makes Ada
> visible outside "the congregation". On the other hand, we preach a lot to the
> converted.

This is Richard Riehle speaking.   I appreciate the kind words about my articles
concerning Ada.    However, much credit should be given to others who have
been writing and publishing articles over the years.   Paul Pukite and Joyce
Tokar
come to mind immediately.   For many years, Do-While Jones was a lone voice
with detailed and entertaining articles regarding Ada.   More recently, there was
a
piece in COTS Journal written by the Ada Product Manager at Green Hills Software.

Others, including Tom Moran, have been published in Dr. Dobbs.    Ben Brosgol
and Ed Seidiwitz have kept the flame alive with their writing and their
conference
presentations.   Many others whose names do not jump out at me in this moment
have also contributed to the published Ada literature in periodicals.

Another thing I am noticing is the increase in awareness of Ada at both computer
conferences and in newly published books.    For a while there was almost no
mention of Ada.   Lately, especially in books on real-time and embedded systems,
I see more acknowledgement of Ada.   In a little book on embedded systems from
O'Reilly, the author even expresses a preference for Ada even though he
illustrates
his examples using C because of its popularity.   He also has some unkind things
to
say about C++.   In a recent comparative programming languages book, Programming
Language Pragmatics (Kaufmann),  the author is unusually fair regarding Ada.  In
Bob Binder's hefty tome on Object-Oriented Testing, Ada is one of the small set
of
languages selected for examples.

This trend is encouraging.  Instead of cheerleading articles about Ada, there is
great
value in seeing respected authors include it, matter-of-factly, in there
discussions of
larger issues.

Editors of periodicals are more amenable to articles that describe solutions
where Ada
was the programming language.   Almost no editor will choose an article that is
simply promoting Ada.   They will be fair if you have a viewpoint to share that
has
value to the computing community.  Most will not reject a good article simply
because you selected Ada for the solution.   They will reject an article that is
nothing
more than Ada evangelism.

There are so many exciting success stories out there that involve Ada.   It would
be
great to see more of you crafting some of those stories into publishable
articles.  If
you are unsure of your writing skills, enlist the help of a colleague who has
good
writing ability.

Richard Riehle