Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[nma124@hotmail.com (steve_H)]

"Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> wrote in message  

>. Engineering costs usually
> aren't the big drivers in most industries, but getting out the door faster
> *is* a major advantage. To that end, better development kits around Ada,
> bigger & better libraries and better access to underlying OS capabilities
> are going to create development leverage that gets end-products out the
> door. 

This is like the chicken and egg problem. Ada won't get popular until
more packages are available. And no packages will be written to it if it
is not popular.

The only way for Ada to become popular is for gcc to have full Ada support,
where any one can just type "gcc foo.adb" on any system where gcc is
installed, and it just works. No downloads, no nothing. ALl the libraries
and all the packages are there.

There is no other way left for Ada for it to become popular. All the
tricks and the speeches have been tried and said.

Commerical Ada compilers from closed commerical companies would make 
no difference to the popularity of a language.  (unless one can
buy it for $99.99 and have full IDE with it, etc.. Sorta like 
the TurboPascal days, which made Pascal the most popular language 
in its days).
 
It is not the few Ada programmers working inside Boeing or the defenss
department who will write those package for everyone to use, it is the 
open source programmers, the college students who want to make some 
impact, and the inspiring programmers who love to program and want
to spend the whole weekend coding for the love of it. Now those 
programmers turn to C and C++ and Java becuse it is everyone and free. Ada
full support in gcc makes Ada an option, and only then you will start to
see more Ada packages and more systems built with Ada. 

Ada has to grow from the bottom up (if it is to have a chane), from the 
masses up. Not from the officies of corporate America down to the
programmers. That is why I think rational rose Ada compiler, or any other
expensive commerical Ada compiler being there or not, will make no 
difference to the popularity of Ada. After all, we hade those for years,
and it did not make Ada any more popular.


just my 2 cents.