Re: Ada and QNX

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <8sg6g2$eur$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <39EB662D.F2C8B55B@acm.org>,
>   Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
>
> > To use an analogy that's been used before: Which is better?
>
> > Sony's Beta format or VHS? From most technical standpoints, Beta was
> > a better format. Why didn't it catch on? A thousand reasons can be
> > given, but few will be based on some sort of
> > "Technical Superiority" of VHS.
>
> Yes, Beta had better picture quality, but that was NOT the
> important technical feature, the dominating technical feature
> was the maximum recording time, and VHS got ahead there so
> significantly that Beta could not catch up.

That is indeed a good example of a technical argument for VHS. However,
I think a far more convincing argument in VHS's favor was that it was an
open format, whereas Beta was closly held by one company. When in
direct competition with an open platform, proprietary formats
typically don't stand a chance. The field of history is strewn with the
rotting corpses of "technically superior" proprietary products that
tried to take on open standards. I'm sure everyone here could name a
score such examples in the fields of computer hardware (lost out to the
open PC standard) and OS (lost out to the relativly open Unix standard)
fields alone. One could argue that the only reason the closed Windows OS
made it this far is that it piggybacked on the dominant open computer
standard (the PC). A particularly bold person could further argue that,
given that an reasonably comparable open OS for the PC is now available,
Windows is now doomed. That is exactly the argument being made in the
essay at http://muq.org/~cynbe/rants/lastdino.htm .

> I recently saw someone say in an influential list on Ada that
> they thought that the fact that Ada had a better defined
> standard was a crucial element to Ada's success. My own feeling
> is that even if this were true (it is not!) then it would not
> be terribly important, and if we concentrated on that aspect

I'd actually say that person was onto something. The Ada standard is one
of the few that is freely avaialable on the web for anyone to read. It
is also one of the few language standards with any kind of teeth to it.
Ada users *expect* to be able to take their code to any other Ada
compiler and have it compile and even behave the same way when run. That
means an Ada user is not nearly as tied to their compiler vendor after a
large amount of code is written. That may prove more important to Ada's
success than any of the "if you could only have one feature" thread
answers.

There's also the issue of protection from OS implementation issues. Most
other languages require their users to go to the OS to do anything
serious. Ada has things like tasking and intertask communications and
synchronization in the language itself. Thus an Ada user is not nearly
as tied to their OS as users of most other languages (even Java in some
cases). So I can write something as complicated as a real-time
scheduler, and move my code to another OS and compiler without changing
a single line of code. (This is not hypotheical. We actually did this!)

So Ada in many ways is a more "open" language standard than any other.
This is the leverage I think it would be wisest to use in proselytizing
the language to the world at large. The "technical superiority"
arguments should still be thrown in as background info, to give
technical folks good fodder for rationalizing their choice. But the
emphasis should be on the open-ness of the language.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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