Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

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

A thing is worth only what you can get someone to pay you for it. People
sometimes get the idea that the laws of Supply and Demand are irrational or
something that ought to be ignored. (Nurses and schoolteachers do such
valuable work. Why don't we pay them what we pay basketball stars?) Supply
and demand - while not exactly Gas Laws, might just as well be. Nobody has
ever successfully violated them for very long. (If there were only five
nurses in the whole world, we'd probably pay them what we pay Michael
Jordan.)

The "Value" of Ada is what you can get someone to pay you for it. One branch
of calculations might show an economic benefit that would seem to justify a
really high price tag, but a) people have substitutes and b) not everything
that they value is figured into the calculations. Sometimes people are
buying "cheap" because long term considerations just aren't important to
them. (Suppose I'm a garage startup evaluating a $100,000 Ada compiler that
only runs on a $250,000 computer - not far from where things were back in
the early days of Ada83. Someone else offers me a C compiler for a PC free
of charge. Are the long term savings of Ada worth it to me? Or maybe I'm
building products that I know are going to be out of date in 12 months and
that I'm *never* going to maintain them after initial release. Time to
market may be my cost driver. Will I buy an expensive Ada compiler over an
inexpensive C++ compiler?)

Of course, I would probably contend that most of this is moot. There *are*
inexpensive and reasonable quality Ada compilers out there that are suitable
for a whole range of development efforts. Cost can't be what is stopping
people from going there. I'd suspect the issue is more one of a) built in
prejudices of the people making language selections and b) lack of
competitive toolsets. Part A we can hope to deal with only through education
and perhaps bringing in a new generation of software engineers with
different prejudices. Part B we can hope to deal with by examining what
people are using to develop in other languages and duplicate++ what is
available to them there.

None of this comes easy. :-)

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/


"Al Christians" <alc@PublicPropertySoftware.com> wrote in message
news:3B4A2B3E.CD91C5DD@PublicPropertySoftware.com...
> advantages. What is the value of food, water, or air?  Aren't we glad
> that no one expects us to pay for these things what they are worth?
>