From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,103b407e8b68350b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-02 20:43:30 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.icl.net!newsfeed.fjserv.net!feed.news.nacamar.de!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!newsfeed.hanau.net!fr.clara.net!heighliner.fr.clara.net!proxad.net!news-hub.cableinet.net!blueyonder!internal-news-hub.cableinet.net!news-text.cableinet.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.1.1.2418 Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea.. From: Bill Findlay Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Message-ID: References: <3E147D79.2070703@cogeco.ca> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2003 04:43:29 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 80.195.52.70 X-Complaints-To: abuse@blueyonder.co.uk X-Trace: news-text.cableinet.net 1041569009 80.195.52.70 (Fri, 03 Jan 2003 04:43:29 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2003 04:43:29 GMT Organization: blueyonder (post doesn't reflect views of blueyonder) Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32474 Date: 2003-01-03T04:43:29+00:00 List-Id: On 3/1/03 02:56, in article av2u64$qj$1@slb5.atl.mindspring.net, "Marin David Condic" wrote: > Machismo may be interesting, but nobody is going to be fooled by empty, > shallow, marketing for very long. It was a joke, Marin. > Eventually, they open the box up and see the same old Ada and word gets out. "Same old Ada"? For all practical purposes Ada 95 is the same age as Java. "Word gets out"? What word is that? Are you saying that there are serious unacknowledged technical defects in Ada 95? Opposition to Ada in comp.arch fell into three categories, which I parody (grotesquely unfairly, I admit 8-) as follows: (1) "We don't care about software quality. We make money selling **** written in C, and that's fine with us." (2) "We do care about software quality. We write our software in C (or other, even less safe, languages) and ensure its quality by being faultless programmers and superior human beings. Ada is for talentless losers." (3) "Ada is too low-level. Our favourite language is Functional-Telepathy/1, which generates an optimal program for you while you are still thinking about the specification. It should be implemented real soon now." Depressingly, type (1) critics were in a majority. When shown evidence (the Rational data) that Ada could help them to make even more money, the response was "I don't believe it"; taken even to the point of suggesting that Rational had fabricated their figures. In other words: "I've no evidence of my own, so I'll find reasons to ignore yours". The intensity of denial was astonishing. Type (2) and type (3) critics tended to post from academic domains (no surprise 8-), although academia did not have a monopoly on false pride. It's interesting that essentially no-one objected to Ada on the grounds of technical or pragmatic issues such as are are openly discussed here. > I don't think Ada is *bad* - That's damming with faint praise. I think Ada 95 is very, very good indeed. > but it sure has a problem selling itself with "reliability", etc. > That's why I've become > convinced that a new emphasis and new tools might do a better job of getting > Ada accepted. I'd be happy to be proven wrong - that all we really had to do > was change the name and use some more cosmetics - but I don't think that's > the case. Why do you care whether anyone adopts Ada, if "reliability, etc" is not the primary concern? I look at this the other way round. I want the general level of software quality to rise, and I believe that better understanding and wider adoption of Ada would promote this objective. I'm more than happy to make common cause with anyone, such as yourself, who has ideas about how to make that happen. But I do not think that it is Ada that is the barrier; and I do think that the barrier is fairly impenetrable. 8-( -- Bill-Findlay chez blue-yonder.co.uk ("-" => "")