Re: status of Ada STL?

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote in message news:<aenioj$rdu$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
> contention would be that these days, libraries and IDEs are the price of
> admission - not a guarantee of success. If you *do* have them, people might

Personally, I'm not sure I believe that. However, I happen to like
them a lot myself. So if some people having this attitude gets more
Ada libraries and development tools made, who am I to complain? :-)

> "Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
> news:4519e058.0206180630.b6ef8cd@posting.google.com...
> > If we look at past successes, what builds language bases isn't
> > wonderful syntax, but rather heavy marketing campaigns (with hopefully
> >
> Marketing got people to open their wallets and give up their hard-earned
> cash in exchange for a rock in a cardboard box. They did it in great
> numbers, too. A strong marketing campaign would do a lot for Ada - but who
> would fund it?
>
> That isn't the only reason languages flourish, but it is one of the reasons
> it happens in recent years. (I don't recall ATT investing heavily in a "Use
> C" campaign - but they did give away an OS that was written in C and had a
> compiler come along for the ride.)

Sort of. There was such a campaign, but it was largely user evangelism
driven. What also worked to C's benifit was that it rode the Unix
wave. Unix *was* heavily pushed by a lot of different hardware vendors
(Sun again being one). If you got Unix, you got C. Other compilers had
to be purchased (or built). This is very similar to the mechanisim
that Microsoft today uses to push things like IE and Windows Media
Player.