Reaching traditional engineering, was: Array mappings

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <D0xJBp.1zp@alsys.com>, Keith Thompson <kst@alsys.com> wrote:
>In <3csnqi$3ee@felix.seas.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:

>I don't know whether or not the marketing department of any Ada company
>did this; I'm just a programmer.  However, how sure are you that it
>*would* have been worth the investment?  Can you produce a Fortran-using
>engineer who rejected Ada 83, but would have used it if it had supported
>Fortan-friendly arrays?

I'm not at all sure if it's worth the investment. I'm looking for
some kind of reassurance that someone looked as seriously at the
engineering community as they (apparently) did at other domains like
UI, IS, realtime, etc. 

I have run into engineers who have expressed surprise at how powerful 
Ada could be in their domain, and wonderment that the Ada vendors haven't 
knocked on their doors. The key things these engineers have focused on 
have been array mappings, math functions, and complex numbers;
they are quite amazed that it took the Ada community nearly ten years
to produce a quasi-standard math library. "If they cared about us,
how come we can't even call square root in a portable way?" Etc.

>You've said in the past that many engineers rejected PL/I because it
>doesn't support Fortran-style arrays, but several postings in this
>newsgroup indicate that it does.  

[snip]

Yes, clearly the ISUB business in PL/1 is quite powerful; that I didn't
know about it, nor, apparently, did any of those engineers I spoke to
at the time, suggests that we were pretty poorly educated on PL/1.
I don't recall it in a textbook, though I may simply have missed it.
I have some old PL/1 books around the office; I'll check.

It's nice to know the feature is there.

>I can easily imagine an Ada 83 compiler vendor adding an
>implementation-defined pragma similar to Ada 95's pragma
>Convention(Fortran) and *still* not being able to sell to all those
>engineers hooked on Fortran.

That is certainly a possibility. See below.

>Perhaps there was a marketing failure for both PL/I and Ada, but it's
>not as simple a failure as the one you portray.  If you have any ideas
>on how to sell Ada to Fortran users, I'll be happy to forward them to
>our marketing department.

Well, I was certainly never privy to the marketing efforts of the
vendors, except for a few relationships I had that were specifically
oriented to improving Ada's acceptance in universities. The various
university programs that came out of those discussions show that
I and other colleagues the vendors consulted were not without influence.
Did the vendors consult with similar folks in other domains, especially
in engineering, putting them under nondisclosure and really picking
their brains?

In discussing the general state of things with vendors, in conference
panels, listening to various conference talks, etc., it is obvious that
there's been a fair amount of effort put into finding out the needs of
various customer domains. The vendors all understood what was missing
in the C interface area, to support better UI development for example
(so we got e.g. implementation-specific callback pragmas). Surveying
the IS community made it clear that decimal types, picture-directed IO, 
etc., would make Ada more attractive to those customers. Real-timers
were supported by lots of implementation-specific work on tasking,
or even non-tasking alternative runtimes. You get the idea.

Vendors often reply to questions about this or that feature with
"we're supporting our customers; the customer is always right."
This is entirely appropriate.

What has struck me as strange is that there's been very little public
discussion on how to reach the _engineers_ and other scientists who
populate the Fortran user community. It's not as though they were
small and poor; lots of effort and, presumably, money has gone into
producing the Fortran 90 standard and High Performance Fortran.
"Scientific programming" is far from dead; that community is alive 
and kicking.

So it seems that this community should have been a logical target 
audience for Ada, especially given the nicely defined numerics, powerful 
array operations, etc. The idea of Fortran-friendly arrays is just
a logical extension, and could have been done legally with that extra
pragma. Obviously no compiler feature is free, but it's hard to imagine
it being terribly expensive either. Same goes for complex numbers.

Yet Ada seems to be not only unused but substantially unknown in that
community; indeed, I am running into engineers who are moving away from
Fortran only to jump on the C bandwagon.

So the question remains: have the Ada companies tested the waters in
the traditional engineering population and been completely discouraged
by the response, or have they simply not gone after it at all?

As you said, Keith, you are a programmer. I'm a technical guy too,
not a marketing one. But it really saddens me to look around at all
that Fortran out there, know how easily much of it could be interfaced
to new Ada code (at least if it's well-designed Fortran with clean
subprogram interfaces), and yet see almost nothing happening.

Maybe our opportunity is long gone, OBE with the advent of Fortran 90
and HPF. Or maybe it's not. Who has data? The data I see, in this group 
and elsewhere, is almost always on the C/C++ opportunities. Who is  
doing the market studies of the traditional engineering community?

Mike Feldman