Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[n_brunot@my-deja.com]

In article <937kc7$ssq$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

> Through the history of Ada we have had people saying
> "If only we did X, then Ada would be more widely used"
>
> But most of these claims have proved experimentally false, and
> I think this is another such case. If someone produced a much
> improved c2ada, I doubt this would suddenly make Ada popular.

I agree.
Experimentally, one must aknowledge that today Ada is far less popular
than other languages, even than much younger ones.
This will not suddenly and magically change without real questions and
answers about that.
Most explanations we read can unfortunately be summarized by :

"Ada is the best, the rest of the world should start to understand it"
followed by a bunch of technical justifications

This is the main thing that really experimentally proved to be totally
counterproductive, even if this is often true.
Only Ada users really care about those explanations.
So the result is that Ada users keep convincing one another that they
made the best choice.
This is totally useless since they are already convinced.
The only consequence is that this keep us blind at the fact that we
haven't the slightest chance to promote Ada with this attitude.

Anybody who talked about Ada to software people not using Ada (which are
unfortunately everything but a minority) knows that the usual answer is :
"Ada ? this still exists ???"

> Indeed, most of the small scale development of which N.Brunot
> talks about is done in Windows environments, and here the
> issue is not translation of C headers.

Not exactly. This is quite restrictive. Most components we use are
available for Win32 and Unix.
Especially because of linux, a very great number of available libraries
are now ported for non Win32 platform.



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