Re: Why so hard to come up with a simple embedded Ada system?

[MRE <Marc.Enzmann@web.de>]

On 17 Jul., 11:46, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de>
wrote:

> But you (education) have time, resources and continuity we (mid-sized
> industry) cannot even dream of.

No, I don't. I am not quite sure where those nice job descriptions for
profs come
from. Every time I read one of those (lots of free time, pursuing
their hobbies,
making huge amounts of money...) I go: "yes, I want one of those jobs,
why don't I have it?".
Reality looks quite different. And: Software development tools ARE NOT
MY JOB!
I can use good ole C for most of what I am doing, so why would my dean
give
me money to do some work on / in Ada? I have not published anything
about language
design, compiler design or any related field, so neither the state,
nor the federal
government nor the European Community is going to fork money my way to
develop a couple
of nice FREE cross compilers.

Have you ever taken a look at what the state of the art is in CS as
compared to
state of the practice? Why do we have all these nice papers
circulating, telling us
how easy it is to develop software -using this or that lanugage,
method etc.-
when we are still using a 40+ years language like C as a standard?

If you wait for universities to drive software-technology, then you'll
get a lot
of quantum-leaps, i.e. you'll most probably not like the direction.
Research goes
where the money is. Pure research in the technical fields -among them
CS- has become
extremely rare.

I've been in the "industry" for quite some time and know how the
blokes in the
avionics business work. I've been working for people for started a new
project in C
because the Ada cross-compiler cost twice as much as the one for C
(Productivity? Never
heard that this will depend on the progrmaming language!). I've
watched
tool vendors try to sell the newest fad (my favourite here being Real-
Time "Java"
for safety-critical systems!) and then go down the drain in ever
tightening spirals.
Why are there so many C compiler vendors out there as opposed to a
very small (and
declining) number of Ada vendors? Because of the universities not
doing research?
I don't think so!

It's the users, the companies that make money by buying tools and
selling software
that have the leverage. They have the money.  True: this will not
always hold for SMEs.