Re: AIA Position on Ada

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <ROGOFF.96Aug25115537@sccm.Stanford.EDU> rogoff@sccm.Stanford.EDU (Brian Rogoff) writes:

  > I believe that what is going on is an example of positive feedback
  > in a control system. Once a technology is a bit more popular than
  > a competing technology, its popularity becomes the reason that
  > people choose it over its competitors. Hence time to market is
  > usually more important than quality, and the type of market
  > "conquered" (say PC vs workstation) is also important...  I first
  > read the "positive feedback" argument in an old (late 1980s, early
  > 1990s) Scientific American article titled "Positive Feedback in
  > Economic Systems" or something like that. I don't believe that
  > this argument applies perfectly to programming language acceptance
  > however. Note that COBOL, Fortran, Lisp, and PL/I :-) still have
  > active user communities.

    The positive feedback argument does apply to programming
languages, but there are two other factors which confound it.  First,
people are the slowest reacting component of the software system.  C
dominated the educational system in the eighties, and we are seeing
the effect of that now.  (Before that FORTRAN, then Pascal, dominated.
Yes, yes, Pascal is still and has been the "toy" language of choice in
CS1, but most CS and engineering programs qucikly shifted to C for
"real" work.  Now Ada is rising rapidly, and has the advantage that
you can use it both for CS1 and "real" projects.)

    The second confounding factor is that there is a critical mass
effect.  Once you pass a certain point, the size of the overall market
doesn't increase the advantages that a language has.  At a lower level
the market fragments.  Once usage and teaching of a language achieves
critical mass, then the "battle" goes almost house-to-house in
application domains.  Right now there are "home" territories
controlled by C, Ada, 4GLs, Fortran, Visual Basic, COBOL, Lisp,
Smalltalk, and SQL.

    One of the problems that the C++ community views with alarm is
that in the one territory they thought they owned, C++ is being
challenged by Java.  I don't expect either to survive the battle, but
maybe I'm an optimist. ;-) Java byte code on the other hand will
survive and prosper.  I just went to a presentation last week on a 4GL
product, where they demonstrated their Java byte code targeted
compiler.
--

					Robert I. Eachus

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