Re: GNAT GPL is not shareware

["Jedi Tek'Unum" <jeditekunum@gmail.com>]

On Saturday, January 31, 2015 at 3:50:02 AM UTC-6, G. B. wrote:
> There are still only very few opportunities for promising academics
> and professionals from industry to cooperate on languages in
> groundbreaking ways, long term. Like there seems to have been when
> Ada did not exists yet, but was wanted. Outside the Big Corps (including
> MIT?)
> that are producing and controlling languages, there is little public
> consultation and cooperation (surprise?).
> Individualism disconnected, too strong the hope and the belief that venture
> capital plus market mechanism will produce a good solution from individual
> offerings. So, we are back to a multitude of incompatible and
> incomplete drafts, some of them surviving because of the the Big Corps
> and its followers.

Not just programming languages. Operating systems are in the same gutter.

I lived through the wild west days of Unix. Forked early. It took many years
for all the players to realize there was advantage to being compatible.
(Converged was never going to happen.) Standardization was moderately
successful and things are definitely better for it.

Then came Linux, which also forked and then converged somewhat less
on the standards.

Then OSX that also moved towards standards.

Leaving us with an "array of choices" that aren't all that vibrant. Yet
much source code is still filled with ifdef hell.

All this combined with the failure of capitalism has left operating systems
in a state of perpetual stagnation.

Really everything in software is stagnated. Hardware too. Everything about
computing has become commoditized. Commoditized chaos is not good.

So back to Ada... Much better foundation technology; no forks. If one were
building software "civilization" from scratch, is there a better language
to start? Would creating yet another programming language really add
anything?