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

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

I'd tend to agree and would add this: Lots of wild-eyed claims of 
productivity have been made in the past in all sorts of different 
contexts and the difficulty is that even if they *are* true, they can be 
hard to realize in practical situations. People then have a tendency to 
tune that out: "Yeah we've heard all that before and even taken a stab 
at it and didn't see the dramatic improvements claimed so why should we 
go for it now?"

OTOH, new languages *have* been adopted, so *something* must be creating 
an incentive for people to go down a new path. I think that some of it 
involves an interest on the part of hobbyists who then see some benefit 
and want to take it into work & try it out there. I think when these 
same hobbyists show it off to their boss, it has some intuitively 
obvious benefits: "Look, boss, I can interface to the OS so much better 
because it is written in my favorite hobbyist language..." or "See how 
much faster I can get a GUI app up and running with my favorite language 
because it comes with all these GUI tools..." or "See how I can get you 
this web app built in days instead of months because its all connected 
up nicely with the browser, etc..."

So maybe it means that you need to offer the hobbyist something *new* 
and *exciting* that has some kind of real obvious leverage in some 
domain that he might be inclined to want to build apps for. Telling him 
"You'll be X% more productive with Y% fewer errors on all those really 
large safety-critical apps you're building in your basement in your 
spare time..." hasn't proven to be real interesting to him.

MDC


chris wrote:
> 
> My problem is that people make claims like that without explaining or 
> supporting them.  I could say I am 10x more productive than Marin 
> whatever the language.  That isn't likely to be true but I have no way 
> of your skills, experience or competance so it'd just be statement of 
> belief (not that it is).  It's a silly example, but highlights the 
> problem.  It might just be that 100 Ada programmers are more productive 
> than 100 C programmers generally.  It maybe true only for specific 
> tasks, situations or it may not be true at all.
> 
> I don't think the productivity argument is convincing at all in the 
> sense that managers and software engineers will not be convinced by it 
> alone.  They've heard them before for language x, y and z and 
> development process p1, p2, p3 ... p5839929 revision 152 (although 
> processes catch on easier than languages and do *seem* to show some 
> level of improvement)!  Money has been spent, time invested and code 
> developed so they won't shift based on the opinions of a few people in 
> the Ada community.


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Marin David Condic
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