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

[dmitry6243@my-deja.com]

In article <93fq4o$6j7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <93fnao$49u$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   dmitry6243@my-deja.com wrote:
> > It must be as insolent as "Ada is an extension of
> > C++ especially designed for Windows", then it works.
>
> Well I don't think we will be hiring you for Ada awareness
> advertising, despite your charming certainty that you know
> the true way to make Ada popular :-)

If I knew how to do it! (:-)) Unfortunately all my attempts to convince
our customers no, not to use, just to consider Ada as an opportunity
have failed. To my limited view, the major reason why, is that 90% of
people never heard this word and the rest think that it another name of
Nabokov's Lolita (:-)).

> > But everybody is saying that C++ is for anything. There is no
> > place for correctness in market wars.
>
> Promoting languages is not easy. You should study the IBM
> experience with PL/1, and also the failure of Java on Windows
> as examples. The former is ancient history, the latter is
> ancient history.

Do you consider PL/1 as a commercial failure? I remember the time when
it was the language of the first choice. That time FORTRAN-IV played the
role of Visual Basic now (everybody know it is bad and still use it) and
PL/1 was something like C++ (everybody thinks it is good and wants to
use it). That time it was surely a (commercial) success.

> There is no magic to explain why a language is successful, it
> really depends on being in the right place at the right time
> with an implementation that presents the right environment for
> the tasks at hand.

There is usually no magic to explain something. The magic is to make
something that would require explanations. (:-))

From this thread:

> > 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 ???"
>
> This has not been my experience.  The response I usually hear is:
>
>  What's Ada?

To my experince, nobody even questions what is Ada.

--
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov


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