From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1479b753518e2325 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) Subject: Re: how to make Ada more popular? Date: 1999/01/25 Message-ID: <78gfid$pra$2@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 436496236 References: <787hk5$q6t@drn.newsguy.com> <78g1n8$9dr$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-01-25T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: One way of making Ada more popular might look a bit strange at first, but is much cheaper than sexy TV adverts: Just rename Ada into something else. Every kid in the computing world seems to know that "Ada is the much too complex 1970s DoD language that nobody uses". We know that this is not true, but marketing experts will tell you that this is completely irrelevant. The name Ada has unfortunately a not too exciting reputation associated with it. I have noticed that people are not impressed if I tell them that I program my PhD project in Ada95. I have therefore started to tell them: "I program my PhD project in GNAT, a cool new, efficient, and secure OO programing language for which there is a high-quality GNU development kit available on the Internet". Wow. People are now impressed! People want to know more about it! Pascal is now called Delphi. Well, then Ada is now called GNAT. The fact that the GNAT programming environment also happens to pass the Ada95 validation suite is just one of its long list of features, and not one that is of too much concern to anybody. Only if people ask, I tell them that GNAT is based on Ada95 and POSIX.5 with many cool library extensions such as a regular expression library and more. Nobody gets excited these days just about an "ISO/IEC 8652 conforming" stamp on some software. I suggest to ACT to generate loads of press releases when GNAT 3.11p is available, not a single of which should contain any reference to Ada. Then see what happens ... ;-) Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: