Re: is ada dead?

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

Note that I did use the plural - "C++ environmentSSSSSS" :-)

As for competition - if there is a significant market there, competitors
will get into the game. The problem right now is that Ada has such a
(relatively) small share of the market, that nobody wants to go fighting
over the scraps. I'd bet that if some vendor offered an Ada kit that started
to sell over a million copies, you'd see Bill Gates "embracing and
extending" it real fast. Right now though, the Ada vendors are maybe
managing to make a living, but nobody wants to compete in a market like
that - they want to go for "The Big Score".

Maybe this is why we Ada-philes feel lucky to have even one vendor around
supporting our favorite platform. If our ranks grew, we'd have more leverage
and could start demanding more.

As for the GPL thing - I think we could fix that real fast if we actually
got the ADCL concept off the ground. We'd probably find *LOTS* of developers
who would gladly put their code out for freely available access if they
thought there was a chance that down the road somewhere, they might make a
buck off of it. Right now with the GPL, you basically get nothing for your
contribution, except possibly the ability to earn a buck as a consultant on
something you are intimately familiar with because you wrote it and the nice
warm fuzzy feeling you get watching Red Hat clean up by selling the code you
wrote.

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/

"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam> wrote in message
news:2$l9ZPZiDd4x@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> In article <9iv1pd$3va$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, "Marin David Condic"
<marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:
> > One of the things that would go a long way to countering the
misinformation
> > and overcoming the objections about tools, etc, would be to have an
> > inexpensive development toolkit sitting on the shelf next to the C++
> > environments with equivalent & better features at a competitive price.
>
> But there is not one C compiler, there are many.
>
> That brings up another problem Ada faces, a lack of competition.
> Advocates are happy just to get one compiler for an environment,
> but there is never the competition that gets one vendor trying to
> outdo the other in features desired by the customer base.
>
> I believe that is also a shortcoming of Freeware, GPL, etc.
> Supporters are inclined to rally around the (single) flag
> than try to do something with broader appeal to the public.