AdaMax? (was: ada to C++ translation)

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

"Ira D. Baxter" <idbaxter@semdesigns.com> wrote in message news:<3c838b53@giga.realtime.net>...
> But I'm not the marketplace, and it doesn't
> always do what we personally think is technically
> rational.

Clearly you have to go where you think your money is as a tool vendor.
That's perfectly understandable. However, you need to be very careful
in making cross-market analogies...

> If you remember BetaMax VCRs, they were technically
> better than VHS.  But the only VCR survivors
> made the arguably rational business decision to go with VHS.

Sigh. The old "BetaMax" argument again?

The driving of BetaMax from the marketplace was not irrational at all,
technically or economicly. First off, BetaMax wasn't inarguably
technicly superior. Beta format had a more limited recording time than
VHS, and that was important to some people.

But more importantly, BetaMax was a proprietary standard that one
company owned and tried to milk as a revenue source in and of itself
(by refusing to release it to other companies w/o huge license fees).
VHS was a free industry standard. So suddenly there were 2 VCR
universes: one with no real competition between VCR makers and one
with oodles of it. Tapes didn't work with both, so consumers got to
choose the winner. A bit of basic microeconomics will tell you that
the result of this situation is almost a forgone conclusion.

What does all of this have to do with Ada? Damn near nothing. If we
had to make an analogy into the videocassete market, VCR's (and their
formats) would be machine languages (CPUs, OS's, programming
platforms, etc.), tapes would be the executable programs, and
programming languages would be sort of analogous to the the camera
techniques used to film the original shows before they transfered to
tape. If damn near everyone else uses an inferior or inefficient one,
there's no real reason that has to affect a content developer's choice
at all. A tool vendor would certianly prefer to make tools targeted to
that larger camera technique user-base (assuming that market isn't
oversaturated). But this has nothing whatsever to do with Beta vs.
VHS.

-- 
T.E.D.
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