Re: Re-Marketing Ada (was "With and use")

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

I think they *know* about it, but they are not much interested in 
teaching a language that appears to be on the decline if not exactly 
"dead". They want to be able to prepare students for the kinds of things 
they'll likely see when they get out in industry and don't want to teach 
something that might be perceived as of purely academic interest with no 
practical use.

It would help if Ada had something *new* to offer or could become "The 
Language To Use" in some specific field of study. Illustration: Robotics 
or Mathematics. If Ada provided something new or aimed to somehow 
address & take over one of those fields, you might see some academic 
interest start to grow. Its a marketing decision that the keepers of Ada 
would have to agree to take. You'd do it by providing some kind of 
specific support for the field of interest and try to get some books & 
programs built to address it. Send out lots of free copies of books with 
software & promotional stuff saying "Ada is now aiming at being The New 
Fortran for mathematical programming..." or something like that.

At the risk of bringing up the subject of a library again, it *would* be 
an easy way to try to promote Ada to the mathematical crowd. Ada already 
has really good support for math and if it came with something more than 
  your average log and trig functions, it might really be able to target 
mathematicians with things they can't get elsewhere. Math is also easy 
to add in a portable way since it is capable of being rigorously defined 
much more easily than many other areas. Some heavy duty math 
capabilities, coupled with things Ada already has (tasking and 
distribution come to mind - what if Ada solved really big math problems 
in parallel very easily?) might be enough to start luring math 
researchers into using it.

MDC


Chad R. Meiners wrote:
> I have a feeling that if Ada were taught in more universities in the US, Ada
> would experience a growth of popularity.  It is hard to go back to other
> programming language after Ada because you start missing all of its
> features.  Of course this just switches the question to "how do we get the
> word out about Ada to educators" ;-|
> 
> -CRM
> 
> 


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