Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[tmoran@acm.org]

> While I'm all in favor of Ada catching errors up front and I accept that
> this means programmers need a mental shift from C to avoid frustration,
  It's the wrong view that with Ada you must fight with the compiler up
front, while while with C your fights are delayed till after compilation.
Perhaps Ada compilers should come in two parts:  a checker/analyzer, and a
code generator.  View the checker as a handy tool to get rid of the
obvious errors before you even bother compiling to code.  Is your program
as important as, say, a progress report to your boss?  Would you use a
spell checker before sending the latter?  Or is a spell checker just a
useless annoyance?

> but a *good* one that hits the shelves 6 months after the competitors
> package does is worthless.
  That's a popular myth.  Pioneers get arrows, settlers get land.  How
long did Visicalc last after Lotus came out?  I helped with the first
WYSIWYG publishing program on the PC, and it was only a very few years
before it ate the dust of much better ones.  Or consider the fate of
Apple's Newton, which preceded Palm.  Who got rich off the WIMP interface?
Not Xerox, not Apple, but Microsoft.