Re: Visual Basic (and other products) kick Ada's ass

[cjames@stout.entertain.com (Colin James III)]

At TOOLS EUROPE '95 (attended at my expense and as a self-described
"Ada refugee"), the same thing was apparent but at a more elegant level:  
Ada was ignored except for an Ada Workshop (which I did not attend so 
I don't know how many showed up) and an Ada academic on a panel about 
multiple inheritance.  

The hoot there was that the academic of NYU/ACT fame attended only because  
two Ada vendors which exhibited (Rational and Thomson -- nee Alsys) split 
the cost of paying the guy's way.  But ironically those two 
vendors demoed **only** C++ tools and environments, with the Ada name just  
embedded in the list of supported languages in their handouts.  

A panel on financial software discussed how Object Pascal, C++, and 
Eiffel had been used successfully in large oo development banking projects 
in, respectively, Societe Generale, Swiss Bank Corp in London, and 
Credit Agricole Lazard Financial Products.

But nothing was done in Ada; NOTHING.  In fact, not one of the papers 
published beforehand in TOOLS 16 (by Prentice-Hall) mentioned Ada.  But 
there were plenty of papers mentioning other languages, such as Eiffel.

If Ada was still a major, leading edge language force in Europe, then 
even the most casual of observers would not have noticed that statistic.

What Greg Aharonian writes about Ada in the US is in fact mirrored 
exactly in Europe, now.

What follows is that the Ada community is simply wasting its time.