Re: ADA os talk

["Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu>]

In article
<20010826235613.1b22c8c2.tonygair@kissmyspam.blueyonder.co.uk>, "Tony
Gair" <tonygair@kissmyspam.blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

> what do people think ???

If you're doing it for Ada advocacy, I would suggest instead creating
some desktop applications and games.

If you created a new OS written in Ada, even I wouldn't switch over if
that was all that recommened it.  And even if many more things
recommended it, I *still* wouldn't switch unless it supported a
reasonable selection of hardware, and a reasonable selection of software
was available so that I could actually do my work on it.

Writing a useful OS from scratch is going to be a huge project, and with
Ada being a very small minority's language among hobbyists, you can't
really expect the number of people chipping in like we've seen with
Linux.

OTOH, you could write desktop applications and games that would run
anywhere, you would be more likely to actually complete them than you
would an OS, you would get usable versions to the public in 1/10 the
time, and (assuming you're talking about free software) you could pick
something that would fill an empty niche rather than competing with one
that is already well established.

And people really will notice that that nifty new {application,game} is
written in Ada.  I remember 20 years ago when even non-programmers were
aware that that nifty new game called _Wizardry_ was written in Pascal.

Just my 0 cents.


Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas