Re: C++ Standardization (was: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation)

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <326B6DFD.732B@ainslie.com.au>,
Shayne Flint  <shayne@ainslie.com.au> wrote:
>I and other Ada users I know (and I suspect many organisations quietly
>using Ada) have felt this way for a long time. We would be mad to go out
>of our way to convince our competition to use Ada.
>
>Ada IS a competitive advantage for many developers including me! 

I disagree with this attitude.  Suppose everybody in the world used feet
and inches to measure lengths, and somebody comes up with a better way:
meters and millimeters, and so forth, where everything's a neat power of
10.  If you're the only company using meters, you're going to have a
hard time buying nuts and wrenches and so forth.  Even though it's
better.  The only way meters can *really* be better is if all your
suppliers adopt it as their normal way of measuring lengths.  Better
yet, all your employees should have learned about meters when they were
6 years old.  Sure, if that happens, then all your competitors will also
be able to use meters instead of inches, and they will benefit, too.

For Ada to succeed, it can't just be better in an isolated sense -- it
has to catch on.

If you were the last company on Earth using Ada, then you would not have
a competetive advantage -- you would be stuck shovelling money into the
last Ada compiler on Earth.  And it would be buggy and inefficient, and
the latest and greatest configuration management tools wouldn't work
with it.

- Bob