cross-posting and selling Ada

cross-posting and selling Ada

[Robert Dewar]

For some time now a thread has been running called "Why large companies
don't use Ada", which has been heavily cross-posted.

Many of the posts are Ada specific, and many are from people supporting
Ada. Yet, we are all sending out a barrage of messages to multiple
newsgroups over and over again emphasizing that large companies don't
use Ada. 

I think it would be useful if at least all the posters to CLA would be
careful with this thread. Change both the subject and the cross-list
post to avoid sending out unintentional negative messages and annoying
other newsgroup readers with ireelevant Ada messages.

No one is forcing or asking anyone to support Ada in any way, but it seems
worth taking the effort to avoid sending negative publicity by accident :-)

If readers of C++ newsgroups etc see a long sequence of known Ada people
sending out dozens of messages at least tacitly aggreing to the subject
post, they are bound to assume that it is correct. 

Sure it is the case that not many large companies are using Ada, but it
would sure be nice if the subject had read something like

"Why aren't more large companies using Ada"

or

"Why don't more large companies see the benefits of Ada"

or something even more neutral!

Robert Dewar
"Working hard, but according to my records, I seem to have missed my 30%
message quota for CLA nearly every day for the last 1000 days!"

Re: cross-posting and selling Ada

[Jules]

In article <3c1p3h$jeu@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>,
	dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
>For some time now a thread has been running called "Why large companies
>don't use Ada", which has been heavily cross-posted.
>
>Many of the posts are Ada specific, and many are from people supporting
>Ada. Yet, we are all sending out a barrage of messages to multiple
>newsgroups over and over again emphasizing that large companies don't
>use Ada. 
>
>I think it would be useful if at least all the posters to CLA would be
>careful with this thread. Change both the subject and the cross-list
>post to avoid sending out unintentional negative messages and annoying
>other newsgroup readers with ireelevant Ada messages.
>
>No one is forcing or asking anyone to support Ada in any way, but it seems
>worth taking the effort to avoid sending negative publicity by accident :-)
>
>If readers of C++ newsgroups etc see a long sequence of known Ada people
>sending out dozens of messages at least tacitly aggreing to the subject
>post, they are bound to assume that it is correct. 
>
>Sure it is the case that not many large companies are using Ada, but it
>would sure be nice if the subject had read something like
>
>"Why aren't more large companies using Ada"
>
>or
>
>"Why don't more large companies see the benefits of Ada"
>
>or something even more neutral!

I don't really think that there is a negative message. Okay, there may be
a LOT of C programmers out there criticising strong typing, but they are
basically just showing how foolish C programmers can be.

Personally, this thread has convinced me to learn Ada, and I have just
downloaded version 2.00 of GNAT for DOS, so that I can learn it over
christmas. It certainly appears to be a better language than C++ (which is
what I was going to learn before I saw this thread in comp.programming).




-- 
/* Julian R Hall				csusb@csv.warwick.ac.uk
   
   Flames should be redirected to /dev/null - I don't know what
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