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=0.7 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,447bd1cf7a88c198 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-01-08 01:25:28 PST Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-02!supernews.com!news.gv.tsc.tdk.com!news.iac.net!news-out.cwix.com!newsfeed.cwix.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!nntp2.deja.com!nnrp1.deja.com!not-for-mail From: n_brunot@my-deja.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do? Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001 09:14:51 GMT Organization: Deja.com Message-ID: <93c0e9$4u6$1@nnrp1.deja.com> References: <3A4F5A4A.9ABA2C4F@chicagonet.net> <3A4F759E.A7D63F3F@netwood.net> <3A50ABDF.3A8F6C0D@acm.org> <92qdnn$jfg$1@news.huji.ac.il> <3A50C371.8B7B871@home.com> <3A51EC04.91353CE7@uol.com.br> <3A529C97.2CA4777F@home.com> <3A53CB9E.EA7CF86C@uol.com.br> <3A5466DE.811D43A5@acm.org> <932aol$ikc$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <932mi6$r2k$1@trog.dera.gov.uk> <9343b1$3g5$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <934iuf$eqv$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <937kc7$ssq$1@nnrp1.deja.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 212.27.43.116 X-Article-Creation-Date: Mon Jan 08 09:14:51 2001 GMT X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; fr-FR; m18) Gecko/20001106 Netscape6/6.0 X-Http-Proxy: 1.1 x57.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 212.27.43.116 X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDn_brunot Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:3766 Date: 2001-01-08T09:14:51+00:00 List-Id: In article <937kc7$ssq$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, Robert Dewar 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. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/