Re: Ideas for Ada 200X

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Yup. That's why I think the vendors could establish what the best 
direction is. They have some clue as to what their customers would want. 
(Generic focus? Object oriented focus? General applications? Realtime 
applications?) If they said "Go make a general application library that 
is object oriented and looked kind of like the MFC, but with an Ada 
flavor..." a design team could go work with that and get somewhere. If 
the vendors based that on some kind of discussions with their customers, 
then it would probably be something that would satisfy a large 
percentage of the Ada users out there.

The key here is to get *something* built that would be accepted by the 
vendors as the library of convention for Ada. It has to ship with their 
products - possibly with a disclaimer: "This is version X.Y of the 
Conventional Ada Library. It is unsupported by us. Go see the Ada 
Library Consortium's web page for the latest versions, bug reporting, 
etc." Most people would use what they got out of the box and accept it 
as being "Ada" That might start Ada down the path of at least catching 
up to Java and C++. Ultimately, it needs to do more, but it has to at 
least take that first step.

MDC

Wesley Groleau wrote:
> 
> I learned a similar lesson from watching a relative "sell"
> real estate.  She'd take the customer to a promising site,
> but then she'd overwhelm them with all the options.
> 
> "You may need _____, which would imply a place with _____.
> But if you have ______, you'd of course want to minimize _____.
> (etc.) ...."
> 
> When she got done with her college-level lecture on
> how to figure out what you need, they'd go buy from
> who _tells_ them, "This is what you need.  Sign here."
> 


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Marin David Condic
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