Re: Ada Operating System

[Wes Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com>]

A pessimist's viewpoint:

To make an operating system successful, you need
at least one of

 - sufficient quantity of useful applications

 - sufficient geek appeal to attract developers.

 - sufficent robustness/power/features to overcome
   the lack of either of the others.

To get people to write applications that run on it,
it must have enough users to make people want to
write apps for it.  So you have a chicken/egg problem
for the first point.

For the second, you have the prevailing distaste for
Ada against you ("Us" if you will).

On the robustness/power/features point, obviously
Ada has a significant advantage over C/C++/Java.

BUT, when you multiply the language potential
by the number of developers, Linux still comes
out ahead.  In spite of its implementation language,
Linux is quite robust, and it has hundreds of
developers for every AdaOS developer to keep it
that way.  Shift the target to features, and
Microsoft will always have you beat there.
They will always sacrifice security/robustness
to beat any competition in features.  And their
"if you can't beat 'em, steal 'em" technique
also applies.

So on the third point, you have say a hundred
developers and a language that scores ten on
some arbitrary rating scale vs. several thousand
developers and a language that scores one or two.

Do the math and Ada loses.  Unfortunately.

-- 
Wes Groleau
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau