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From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com>
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Subject: Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?
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Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 21:57:06 GMT
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Date: 2001-01-09T21:57:06+00:00
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Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> In article <93fnao$49u$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> > It must be as insolent as "Ada is an extension of
> > C++ especially designed for Windows", then it works.
> 
> Well I don't think we will be hiring you for Ada awareness
> advertising, despite your charming certainty that you know
> the true way to make Ada popular :-)
> 
> > But everybody is saying that C++ is for anything. There is no
> > place for correctness in market wars.
> 
> Promoting languages is not easy. You should study the IBM
> experience with PL/1, and also the failure of Java on Windows
> as examples. The former is ancient history, the latter is
> ancient history.
> 
> There is no magic to explain why a language is successful, it
> really depends on being in the right place at the right time
> with an implementation that presents the right environment for
> the tasks at hand. After all remember that Visual Basic is
> vastly more successful than C or C++ on the PC!

I believe that one thing that held back Ada for the masses, was
the size of the compiler, and its availability. All of that has
changed now.

Today, gnat no longer consumes your system when it compiles and
it is freely available now. This could actually turn the tables 
for Open Source developers (at least) if you can only convince 
developers to give it an honest try.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg