Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

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

True - there are lots of "specialized needs" that make it difficult to 
forsee what parts of a library ought to be standard and what sorts of 
components should be left to the individual user.

But a couple of observations:

1) Just because nobody was battering down the door asking for that 
particular feature doesn't mean that if it were in a standard library it 
wouldn't get used. Ada has a particular class of followers. The guys 
spending their time diddling around with mpeg video and other formats 
are most likely *not* Ada adherents. (I worked with a lot of video 
weenies - they're mostly doing this in C) Part of the belief has to be 
"If you build it, they will come!" Perhaps more accurately: "If you 
*don't* build it, they will stay away in droves!" You've got to think of 
a particular market segment and give them whatever tools they need to do 
the job or they have absolutely no reason to switch from what they 
already have to what you're offering.

2) Sometimes the existence of some feature nobody was asking for starts 
to generate its own interest. You put a complete audio/video library 
into Ada and maybe there are a bunch of college kids who got the 
development kit and they decide they're going to start playing games 
with it. Before you know it, they're the next Internet millionaires 
because they dreamed up some cool MTV kind of app based on the 
audio/video tools you gave them. Ada suddenly finds more adherents.

3) Presumably, if we were to have some kind of Conventional Ada Library, 
it would be getting distributed in source code format under some 
reasonably non-restrictive license. Hence, someone could easily start 
extending the library for their own specialized needs. Having done so, 
you'd like a mechanism for them to be able to submit their particular 
branch of the library for inclusion in the standard distribution. 
Hopefully, the publisher of the Conventional Ada Library would be 
willing to take it under consideration, review it to see that it met 
with whatever standards were maintained for the library, perhaps wave it 
in front of some of the user base to get some input, etc., and then 
include it if it seemed like the right thing to do.

I sympathize with the view you express about working hard on some 
library feature and finding little interest in it from the customer 
base. You've obviously got to prioritize based on what existing users 
think they need. But you also have to break new ground or you will 
*never* attract new users from new problem domains. They've got to see 
tools they need in your toolkit or they have no incentive to consider it.

MDC



tmoran@acm.org wrote:

> them.  That, IMHO, is one of the problems with creating new standard Ada
> libraries: each individual library seems to be wanted by only one person,
> so that person winds up writing it - designed to his own immediate preferences.


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Marin David Condic
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