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

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

Without commercial products being built in Ada, there is no revenue. 
Without revenue, nobody spends much to buy Ada from the vendors. The 
vendors eventually start following the revenue. Hobbyists & students are 
not going to keep the vendors interested. So Ada needs to target the 
commercial developers of software or its vendors eventually go off and 
write C++ compilers - or go out of business. That seems obvious, but its 
difficult to get any real consensus on how to do that or where to go 
with it.

Ada may shine in some areas - large, long lived, high reliability 
systems where connections to ancillary products (GUI, database, 
netrwork, libraries, OS's, development/support tools) are a negligible 
issue. But those systems are few and far between. Other languages do 
better because they provide more leverage in some application domains - 
they come equipped with all the stuff someone needs to get their app 
done quicker. Ada needs to identify some reasonably large sector of the 
compiler-buying public and go way out of its way to make life as easy as 
possible for developers in that sector.

We just won't win out if the best answer we have to someone who needs a 
GUI or a database or a network connection or some other 
non-general-programming need is to say "Well, you can always go build a 
binding to this C library...." We have to give them a *better* answer 
than they already get with C/C++/Java/VB/etc. or they have no incentive 
to want to go learn Ada and start using it. Pick a new market and start 
catering to it.

MDC

Richard Riehle wrote:
> 
> If we want to revitalize interest in Ada, we must do so by creating good
> systems
> in Ada.   I mean by this, good commercial software products.  As we do so,
> we
> can make it known that the quality of these products is, in part, because we
> used
> Ada.   At present, with the exception of ACT and RR Software, even the Ada
> compiler vendors use other languages for their own internal software
> projects.
> 
> Ada can be popular.  It is all uphill from here.   Ada programmers of the
> world
> unite.  You have nothing to lose but your C++.
> 
> Richard Riehle
> 

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Marin David Condic
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