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From: khrabrov@unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Alexy Khrabrov)
Subject: Nazi Java against Socialist Ada
Date: 1999/01/20
Message-ID: <7855v9$nju$1@netnews.upenn.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 434888926
Summary: Marketing is everything
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Keywords: Nazism Socialism Communism Weimar Ada Java
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-01-20T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Greetings Ada marketeers --

This is not a religious language flame, but rather
a striking parallel I felt when reading the book
"Germany: a New History" from Harvard Press.  The
idea applies to what proponents of Ada should feel
seeing Java seizing Ada's strengths and stealing
the voters base.

The same thing happened in German political
history at the demise of the Weimar Republic.  The
strongest parties were those of the Left -- SPD,
the Social Democrats, and KPD, the Communists.
They fought for the hearts of the workers among
themselves and couldn't explain or stop the Nazis.

But the workers went with the Nazis.  It puzzled
Communists ot of their minds.  Indeed, Marxist
prophecies stipulated monotonically increasing
power of the workers representatives, i.e. the
Communists themselves, until the Revolution came.

Communists invented all kinds of explanations why
the workers "betrayed their historical destiny",
including evil capitalists paying Hitler to
distract the workers from the righteous class
struggle.  (Or tagged type struggle, in Ada
parlance.)

It never occurred to them that Hitler appealed to
the emotions of the people, while Socialists and
Communists tried to ride the same old horse of
rusty reason.  In this way, Nazis were the
"coolest" party, way ahead of all others,
foreseeing the politics of the end of the century.

My suggestion: Rational, Mitre, etc., should
unite and buy TV ad space for sexy promotion of
Ada.  E.g., show a guy eating pizza at 2 am and
hastily putting together a buggy C++ contract
program due at noon.  In the next segment, show
another guy dining with a sexy woman, discussing
how easy it was for them to modularize the problem
in Ada...  :-))

Cheers,
Alexy V. Khrabrov
Department of Computer & Information Science
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA