Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

Cesar Scarpini Rabak wrote:

> In a nutshell, I partially agree that to regain momentum (out of some
> academic circles and specific niche markets). We need to get some
> projects public interest and get them a feel of the advantages of "our"
> programming environment.
>

Two things might help: One is more and better development tools. The other would
be if there was a large institution trying to push it for purposes of their own
"product distinction". Sun decided to push Java and to a large extent succeded in
gaining a large part of the market. If, for example, Compaq or IBM were to make
Ada an objective, they'd have enough marketing muscle to gain a nice chunk of
business.

Another problem still remains. Despite everyone's best efforts, there still
remains a lot of perception that Ada is "A Bad Thing" based on all sorts of
misconceptions and odd preferences on the part of many programmers. You just say
the name and you can draw sneers of derision from many people who couldn't even
recognize the syntax of the language if they saw it. Maybe a name change would
help? Make Ada0x become Augusta0x? "Hey! We have this whole brandy-new
programming language called 'Augusta' and it has a lot of spiffy features. Try it
out!"

>
> The idea of games seems interesting, an OS seems to me too far fetching
> (let alone FSF struggling to finish their GNU OS, a small community of
> Ada programmers would be faster?). Other things we could try is to go
> the FSF "todo/wishlist" and look for some production software FSF needs,
> some of them although not as exciting as games or rocket control, are
> still software engineering respectable projects, and if they catch the
> user audience they rather be stable/robust. Two which I recall were
> office related includind a general ledger program. I wonder if a Free
> version of an ERP package wouldn't be more worth investing than a
> competing OS.

ERP is beginning to fall out of vogue. While it still exists, b-school thinking
and management fad is that there are really only a handful of companies large
enough to benefit from it and that the dollars in vs dollars out just aren't
there to justify it.

An OS would be a good thing, but I think it will just take too long to get built.
It wouldn't hurt if it had a large corporate sponsor looking for that product
distinction again, but who would that be? The OS would have to have some
significant advantage over Windows or the computer makers will ignore it in favor
of the larger market. Personally, I'd like to see an OS that was capable of
running on a PC, but was suitable for realtime work. (Windows is not, which has
spawned a market for add-on products that make it usable in realtime.) If it came
in source code and modular pieces that made it easy to pick and choose what you
wanted for an embedded product, it would have an advantage in that it could run
on a PC where you could do your development & then have an easy path to the
embedded machine. (The sort of direction that Lynuxworks has gone in)

Business software may be a good idea, but most small businesses couldn't be
bothered with anything that isn't an off-the-shelf solution (well documented!)
and wouldn't want to spend any time customizing software. They either buy a box
full of accounting stuff and run with whatever it does or they outsource the job
to a big data processing firm.

Think about the things that are most frequently used and where having open source
code would be a big advantage. That's the sort of project that might make a good
market for Ada.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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