Re: Ada Compiler Pricing (was Re: Hijacking a Thread was RE: New Ada compiler for .NET)

[Adrian Hoe <mailbox@nospam.adrianhoe.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> I'd agree that Ada's lack of followers isn't really related to some sort of
> Left Wing reluctance to touch anything that might be associated with the
> military. Its more that there is a general perception that things designed
> for the military won't be suitable for commercial use and that corresponding
> commercial technology will be cheaper. Look at the Mil-Std-1553 bus. Its a
> good, reliable means of blipping bits up and down a wire and many companies
> that make avionics for both the military & commercial sector will use the
> 1553 for the military side of the shop, but never consider it for the
> commercial side.
> 
> Why? Probably mostly price. 1553 cards are still quite expensive when
> compared to something else like an Ethernet card, which is far more complex
> in what it has to do. Probably it starts with vendors figuring they can milk
> the government cash-cow and thus making little effort to reduce costs.
> (Government accounting policies help this along too.) Hence some similar
> technology goes to the private sector and competition + volume starts
> driving the cost down. Pretty soon, its a self-fulfilling prophecy: Military
> equipment costs more than commercial equipment.
> 
> Ada certainly messed up on that one too. Especially back in the early days,
> the prices were so high that any private citizen who thought he might be
> interested in getting involved with Ada would look at the price tag and
> immediately be consumed with an urge to deficate. RR Software helped that
> picture some, but not before the damage had already been done. There was
> also the overall damage done by the poor quality and lack of validation of
> the early compilers - leading people to believe that Ada was just another
> overpriced, unworkable government boondoggle. Early impressions are really
> hard to overcome.


The lack of Ada books is another reason why Ada is unable to catch on 
the band wagon. No doubt there are a few very good books on Ada. But 
the number is simply not enough to catch people's attention.

I came in contact with an Ada compiler on Apple CP/M in the early-mid 
80's. It was dirt cheap. It cost next to zero simply because I copied 
it from a computer shop. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any Ada books. 
I could only understand some of the Ada syntax and lexical from its 
limited examples. There wasn't any Internet in my country then. 
Lacking of resources, I shut down on Ada.

Compare to C/C++, there are tonnes of C/C++ books out there. I have 
more than 25 C/C++ books in my personal library. But I have only 7 
books on Ada.

Another cause is the availability of C/C++ compilers/tools. C/C++ has 
wide support across any platforms which include PDAs. It is easy to 
develop an application for any PDAs using C/C++. In contrast, one has 
to go through long haul using Ada to develop a simple application for 
PDAs. This is why my company is still using C/C++ for developing PDAs' 
applications and we still struggling to ride on Ada.

Other than the technical merits of Ada, it still has a very wide gap 
to gain more acceptance as a development tools compare to others like 
C/C++.
-- 
type Dmitry is new Adrian;           -- Adrian Hoe
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