Re: status of Ada STL?

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Russ wrote:
> Oh, so Ada needs "moneybags" like Sun or Microsoft behind it, eh?

No, I never said that, and I don't believe it does. It doesn't really 
matter either way though, because it doesn't have one and isn't likely 
to get one in the near future. We have to find a way to make do with 
less financial resources to purchase glowing media coverage.


> Let's see, the DoD annual budget has been around $200,000,000,000 to
> $300,000,000,000 for the past couple of decades, and it MANDATED Ada
> for much of that time.

:-)
You could make this number even larger by using the US tax rolls for 
those years. After all, the DoD is part of the US government. Actually, 
you could even trump that by using the US GDP, on the basis that the 
government is owned by the people.

If you want to be realistic about it though, you'd have to compare the 
money spend on marketing Ada by the AJPO to comparable amounts spent by 
Sun's marketing department on Java. It would be much more interesting to 
see that comparison.

A lot of the stuff they did do (like the mandate) was at least partially 
counterproductive. The mandate served its purpose for the DoD quite 
well, but it didn't help Ada out all that much. The point of the mandate 
was not to promote Ada, it was to lessen the tremendous amount of 
different languages that were being used on DoD jobs. With the mandate 
in place, it made it a bit tougher to use one of the little niche 
languages, like CMS-2. However, the effect on Ada was roughly the same 
as the effect on the popularity of classics like Shakespeare among high 
school students when they are forced to read it for a class.