Re: Ada95 and .NET

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Well, that's a little like tossing a stink-bomb into the room. :-)

Its unfortunate that there is a perception out there that Ada is inevitably
going to miss the boat on a newly emerging environment, simply because it is
Ada and hence, can't win. (Sort of the Al Bundy of programming languages?
:-) I'd like to think that Ada is nicely positioned to be directed at a new,
emerging environment and that all it takes is for someone to jump at the
opportunity & get to market first and all will be rosy in the Ada world.
Unfortunately, I can understand where you come from on this. All too often,
Ada has just managed to show up a day late and a dollar short so that it
ends up in the "Also Ran" category.

The problem is that even if there is a wonderful new environment in which
Ada could take the lead, it all too often requires major resources to take a
stab at capturing it. The technical development is costly enough, but then
there's the sales and marketing effort that has to be done and that can be
far more costly. Who has that kind of money to invest?

Probably the most likely growth path for Ada is to get into some small,
emerging environment that is being built by a handfull of geeks or a small
company or community of users. If that environment succeeds, then Ada flies
with it. Trying to bust into a market of millions of users against industry
giant competitors is a bit unlikely. I think Sun Tsu had something to say on
the subject.....

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/



"William J. Thomas" <wjthomas@wcvt.com> wrote in message
news:tdfn7gao7n1q28@corp.supernews.com...
> If doing so would by any means give Ada an early in-road to a new market,
or
> put Ada in a position of being 'out in front' or 'just in time' for a
> change, then you can almost bet that it will be a good two years ( or
> however long it takes to possibly have no positive impact at all) before
you
> will see an implementation for the .NET platform.  And when you do see Ada
> on the .NET platform you can be sure it will be some kludged superficial
> hack that requires contortions, cranks, and incantations to fire up just a
> Console application. An implementation that fully embraces the .NET
concepts
> along with a full blown 'state of the art' kick ass GUI builder, well.....
> Just be thankful that you have Ada for embedded systems and leave the .NET
> GUI world to C#.
>