Re: GNAT for MS Visual Studio

[Markus E L <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

"Steve" wrote:

> "Markus E L" <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de> 
> wrote in message news:u1wsudty5c.fsf@hod.lan.m-e-leypold.de...
>>
>> "Steve" wrote:
> [snip]
>>> What I was trying to point out (if anyone was listening) is that there 
>>> are
>>> tools available (for tool builders, which I'm not... its just not my 
>>> forte')
>>> that should make it relatively easy for tool builders to include support 
>>> for
>>> interactively building .NET forms in the Visual Studio 2005 development
>>> environment.
>>
>> Obviously not easy enough to make building those tools into a viable
>> market. That might be due to the size of the market or the difficulty
>> / ineconomy of maintaining such support over the years.
>>

> That is the point that I question.  

And that is the point where I question your wisdom regarding business
viability of products. Randy (who has much better insight and much
more experience than I do) already said practically everything that
could have been said.

> Prior to Microsoft opening up the VS for adding tools I am certain
> that that was true.

I'm not talking about closed or open interfaces. I'm talking about
_mutation_. About the fact that I would -- within a ten year product
cycle -- have to fiddle with my product all the time to adapt it to ne
strategies, extended APIs (so that it interacts with the rest of VS)
and so on.

> But who knows.  It might turn out that the amount of work required
> to able to build forms interactively is minimial.

So perhaps _you_ can make a flourishing business from that? If not,
you perhaps have to believe others (Randy) that they decided against
for very good reasons. As with the pudding: The proof is in the eating
-- I'll believe you're right, if I see someone doing the VS
integration you're demanding and succeeding. After his/her product is
on the market for some years I might even buy it enad perhaps use it. 

Until then, and that is the important point, I won't trust most of my
code to some GUI builder, because I know that Make and Emacs will be
there in 10 years, but the GUI builder might not. And I hate what
happens to my application when tool vendors go out of the market.

> That functionality already exists for multiple languages. 
> Perhaps there are nice classes that just need to have the details of the 
> language defined.  That sort of thing certainly didn't exist in the past, 
> certainly not from Microsoft, but you never used to be able do download a 
> compiler for free from Microsoft either.


>> Still my point applies: You cannot imagin building GUIs w/o
>> "interactively building" etc. My suspicion why there is no market for
>> GUI builders is:
>>

> Actually, on the contrary I think this is one of the reason there is 
> (almost) no market for Ada in the general computing community.

Actually this is one of the generic usenet arguments: "I have pet
peeve X. I think this is the reason why your interest Y has no market". 

Give me some corroboration.


> I went through the process of justifying the choice of language for a system 
> several years ago.  At the time I was able to move things toward Ada.  Since 
> then matters beyond my control have moved things toward C++ and C#.
>
> In my experience, when the choice of a programming language has to be 
> justified, any capability that choice A has over choice B is part of the 
> consideration.  Sometimes the reasons are real, sometimes they are not. 
> That's just the way things work.  Unfortunately with Ada the GUI generally 
> goes in the disadvantage category.

Actually I don't think so. At least for Gnat there is binding to a
portable tool kit. This is an advantage, not a disadvantage (at least
in some quarters).

Regards -- Markus