Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

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

You can't really mean that, can you? Luck is the only thing that makes 
anybody or anything successful? Babe Ruth was just lucky and it didn't 
have anything to do with skill & practice? Henry Ford just tripped over 
a car one day and got filthy rich without creativity and hard work? 
Thomas Edison's light bulb caught on & became popular because it was 
crap with a good marketing plan?

I'd seriously have to differ here. Yes, "Luck" can play a role in the 
success of anyone or anything - but you first have to do a lot of hard 
work and get a lot of things right so you can be in the right place at 
the right time for "Luck" to hit you.

Java provides an identifiable market with a toolset that fits their 
needs better than other available products. That market is pretty big. 
Java got "Lucky" because someone took the time to identify the market 
they wanted to address with Java and figured out what that market wanted 
& needed to get its job done.

Ada, OTOH, identified (and still does) a relatively *small* market niche 
- embedded/realtime & now large/long-lived/high-reliability systems. 
That market was rapidly changing at the time from a "go it alone" niche 
that took care of itself technologically to a "market follower" that 
would take its technology from the vastly larger segment of PC/User-apps 
market. Having identified the wrong market to address at the wrong time, 
Ada went off to tell that market "I'm much wiser than you are about what 
you need, so here's the way you're going to do it and you're required to 
do it *my* way..." rather than really finding what the market wanted & 
needed. Is that (bad) luck or just bad decisions?

To a large extent, Ada is *still* addressing the wrong market. The 
realtime/embedded/long-lived/high-reliability market cannot afford to go 
out and have its own language. It needs to be competitive and it needs 
lots of really sophisticated tools and it just isn't big enough to be 
able to afford to pay to get all that stuff on its own. Hence, it now 
relies on the things produced for the much larger market & then 
customizes them for their own needs. Its fundamentally cheaper than 
trying to build up your own little world. Yet Ada bemoans the fact that 
the market is "going with the crowd" as if its being run by a bunch of 
four star idiots, when in fact, these guys have run the numbers and come 
to the conclusion that their dollars are better spent using compilers & 
tools that are stamped out by the bajillions and sold/used all over the 
planet. Is that (bad) luck or a failure to pay attention to the customer 
and see what is driving his decisions?

So Ada can continue to persue that particular market nich or it could 
take a new direction. To persue that market niche, it needs to provide 
*everything* someone can get by going with C++ or Java and something 
extra to motivate swimming against the tide *plus* it will need to build 
the pool of available human resources that one can get when one 
advertises for C++ or Java programmers. Ada can do this and hope to get 
lucky or it could realize that is a losing proposition and go down 
another route.

If Ada were smart about it, it would go about trying to remake itself 
into a language that will address some much larger segment of the 
market. If it identified that larger (more profitable) segment and went 
about trying to satisfy that market by providing it with far more useful 
stuff than can be had with Java or C++, it just might find itself in a 
position to be "Lucky". If it got big there, then it might be a lot 
easier for someone in the realtime/embedded/long-lived/high-reliability 
market to go along for the ride.

If Ada were smart, the vendors would get together, figure out what the 
best new market would be, agree to go address it, find out what that 
market wants and then vigorously go and build for that market. If it 
offered something *new* and *exciting* to that market and did it better 
than anything else out there, it might get lucky and find that "Critical 
Mass" audience that would make it usable by the smaller niches it 
originally wanted. Will it do that or just sit back and complain that 
the market it wanted was just full of fools?


MDC



Randy Brukardt wrote:
> 
> The reason that Java got successful (like the reason that *anything* or
> *anyone* gets successful) was luck. Sun got what had been a widely ignored
> language/system tied to a skyrocket (the internet) by putting applet support
> into Netscape. That got the foot in the door where heavy promotion could
> make an effect.
> 
> Remember, it's a combination of luck and marketing that makes anyone or
> anything successful. Merit has very little to do with it - the only
> requirement being that the product fufill some (but not necessarily all) of
> its promises.
> 
> Most software is crap because you can sell crap as well as easily as
> gold-plated programs. Since most managers know this, why would they care if
> they use crap to develop it? It's the same reason that so many software jobs
> are being outsourced -- there it's any reason to get anything beyond an
> adequate job at the cheapest possible rate.
> 
> Those of us who would like something better are swimming upstream in the
> Niagara River; we're almost (but not certainly) doomed to fail.
> 
>                           Randy.
> 
> 
> 


-- 
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm

Send Replies To: m   o   d   c @ a   m   o   g
                    c   n   i       c   .   r

     "Face it ladies, its not the dress that makes you look fat.
     Its the FAT that makes you look fat."

         --  Al Bundy

======================================================================