Popularizing Ada

[xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan)]

In a thread "Subject:  Re:  When will Ada big moment arrive?
what is missing?  " to which my offline posting composition
methods will never add a strand, Marin David Condic
<condicma@bogon.pwfl.com> wrote:

> Remember that C was around for a long time before it
> caught on with any "mass market" appeal.

My impression was that it caught on via BSD Unix and cheap
software for college use, and by appeal to the hacker
mentality.

> The more we do with Ada and the more useful tools we make
> available, the more likely it is Ada will appeal to the
> masses.

I'd rephrase that as "the more fun code we put in the way of
anyone who wants to mess with it, the quicker Ada will gain
a growing cadre of fanatic users".

> Hey!  Anybody out there want to write the next Great
> American Operating System in Ada?  I'm game!  Linux, watch
> out!  :-)

I think a more fruitful approach would be to rewrite and
enhance something like Nethack, in Ada, perhaps as an open
source code multi-university grad school project for a
"cooperative programming in the large" class.

The idea here being sort of like the TV ads where the mom
doesn't tell the kids the juice drink is good for them, just
lets them find out it is fun to drink.

Elsewhere, MDC also wrote:

> So is there some other figure of speech we could abuse in
> this context?

Several ideas come immediately to mind:

"The Ada cure for the common OS"?
"The AdaOS that restores the ozone layer"?
"The AdaOS cure for cancer"?
"The Ada that saves the ecOSystem"?  <-- my vote
"AdaOS for peace in our lifetime"?
"The OS in Ada that ate Manhattan"?
"Ada95OS: last millennium's answer for this millennium's problems"?

I could go on, but I discovered a previously unnoticed
lingering fragment of a conscience at about this point.

===== random archive quality quote =====
"Only the Objectivists have an answer to all our problems, and it's wrong."
  -- Hans Huettel
--
Kent Paul Dolan, <xanthian@well.com>, <xanthian@aztec.asu.edu>