Re: Popularizing Ada

["Philip Brooke" <pbrooke@accurate-automation.nospam.com>]

I don't know whether someone has already suggested this:

A great many people access the Programming pages of About.com (formerly
miningco).  C++, Java, and Delphi are all there.  Where is Ada?  I know that
it would take a dedicated person to act as an editor for an Ada section
there.  This probably would mean either someone with a great deal of extra
time or someone whose employer thinks that his time on that project is worth
while.

Any other ideas on the subject?

        Regards,

        Philip Brooke
        pbrooke@N0SPAM.accurate-automation.com


======================================================

Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@well.com> wrote in message
news:7jr7c3$rc3$1@its.hooked.net...
> In a thread "Subject:  Re:  When will Ada big moment arrive?
> what is missing?  " to which my offline posting composition
> methods will never add a strand, Marin David Condic
> <condicma@bogon.pwfl.com> wrote:
>
> > Remember that C was around for a long time before it
> > caught on with any "mass market" appeal.
>
> My impression was that it caught on via BSD Unix and cheap
> software for college use, and by appeal to the hacker
> mentality.
>
> > The more we do with Ada and the more useful tools we make
> > available, the more likely it is Ada will appeal to the
> > masses.
>
> I'd rephrase that as "the more fun code we put in the way of
> anyone who wants to mess with it, the quicker Ada will gain
> a growing cadre of fanatic users".
>
> > Hey!  Anybody out there want to write the next Great
> > American Operating System in Ada?  I'm game!  Linux, watch
> > out!  :-)
>
> I think a more fruitful approach would be to rewrite and
> enhance something like Nethack, in Ada, perhaps as an open
> source code multi-university grad school project for a
> "cooperative programming in the large" class.
>
> The idea here being sort of like the TV ads where the mom
> doesn't tell the kids the juice drink is good for them, just
> lets them find out it is fun to drink.
>
> Elsewhere, MDC also wrote:
>
> > So is there some other figure of speech we could abuse in
> > this context?
>
> Several ideas come immediately to mind:
>
> "The Ada cure for the common OS"?
> "The AdaOS that restores the ozone layer"?
> "The AdaOS cure for cancer"?
> "The Ada that saves the ecOSystem"?  <-- my vote
> "AdaOS for peace in our lifetime"?
> "The OS in Ada that ate Manhattan"?
> "Ada95OS: last millennium's answer for this millennium's problems"?
>
> I could go on, but I discovered a previously unnoticed
> lingering fragment of a conscience at about this point.
>
> ===== random archive quality quote =====
> "Only the Objectivists have an answer to all our problems, and it's
wrong."
>   -- Hans Huettel
> --
> Kent Paul Dolan, <xanthian@well.com>, <xanthian@aztec.asu.edu>
>