The Two Cultures -- Workstation and PC

The Two Cultures -- Workstation and PC

[munck]

In INFO-ADA Digest V92 #63, Mike Feldman writes:

>Meridian, Alsys, and RR are, in my opinion, guilty of a terribly
>myopic view of Ada, shared by much of the Ada industry. ...
>Why are Borland and Microsoft compilers sold in every software
>store in town, but nobody's heard of Meridian?

Let me put it a tad stronger: the entire DoD software community is
guilty of a terribly myopic view of software development.  I've
ranted and raved about this on the projects I work on - STARS and
PCIS - and still it continues on CIM, I-CASE, SBIS, etc.

Basically, we ignore and are ignorant of the large and growing
world of PC software, living solely in our shrinking world of UNIX
and workstations.  I'm afraid good old Ted has a point here (ON
HIS HEAD!! no, no. be nice,), something is happening here and we
don't know what it is, Mr. Jones.

I consider myself fairly expert on both UNIX/X and MS-DOS/Windows,
having successful fielded products in both realms. Both OSs are
lousy, awful, miserable.  However, UNIX/X has an order of
magnitude more bugs than MS/Windows, and I mean the solid, basic
structure bugs that by now are called "features."  The trouble is
that hardly anybody above the rank of serf in DoD software knows
more UNIX than mail, ls, and 6 vi commands, so they don't know
what a horror it is.  On the other hand, I've seen and used some
wonderful development environments on MS-DOS, and with Windows 3.1
just coming into its own (and NT in the wings), they're getting
better at an amazing rate.  The DDL and OLE facilities in Windows
3.1 make UNIX look like it's a quarter of a century old.

What would make Ada succeed?  A $99 shrink-wrap TurboAda with a
good 386 code generator and full MS Windows environment and
libraries plus network and file server support for team
programming.  Would it be a commercial success?  I think so; I'd
be willing to take a chance by working for the company that
produces it.

Bob Munck