Re: Re-Marketing Ada (was "With and use")

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> Ever heard of hiding a lamp under a bushel basket? You can have the 
> greatest technology in the world, but if you can't effectively 
> *communicate* that to a wide number of people how are they going to know 
> about it or be inspired to try it out? Ada has been one public-relations 
> disaster after another from its inception. People felt it was being 
> rammed down their throats. They had the perception it was slow, buggy 
> and way too expensive. They didn't think it addressed their problems and 
> that it would not work. We can stand here all day and say "That's not 
> true!!!" but effectively, that message did not get sent to the wide 
> range of potential users. Marketing, advertising and sales might have 
> helped that a lot.
> 
...
> 
> So we've got another language revision coming out. The problem is it is 
> more of an "incremental" revision - relatively minor enhancements to the 
> language rather than anything new and big with respect to capabilities. 
> If Ada had some revolutionary new thing to offer, it might have 
> something to hype within the media. (Like if it had a library that went 
> beyond what people traditionally expect?) If it had something *new* to 

I think most of us would agree that Ada was ahead of its time
when it came out. By 1995, I believe the "market" had probably
already accepted C/C++ as the dominant language, largely due to
its widespread use in operating systems (UNIX + NT), and major
applications. Even in 1995 (including up to present) the kind of
thing you hear now is "I remember Ada". Immediatly the association
is that it is "old", even though C is just as old (younger folks
often havn't even heard of it, unless the University taught it).

Even though Ada has been updated, and going through
another update, people seem to remember it as a "once was"
technology.

Or they remember it was too big, or too slow. People tend
to see C as lean and mean, and C++ not much different.
The Ada compiler technology was a challenge for ancient hardware,
but people seem to fail to realize that even though applications,
O/S's have bloated over the years and CPUs have kept pace,
that Ada translaters are no longer "huge" burdens on todays
hardware. Witness the speed that GNAT runs on a laptop. Witness
the small disk footprint of GNAT on a 120GB hard drive ;-)

I think one possible prong of a concerted new Ada marketing
campaign needs to be:

   "Ada is still ahead of its time"

or perhaps something like:

   "Ada is still ahead of the pack"

or some such.

Somehow we have to shake this impression that Ada is old,
outdated, fat or ugly.

I have said this before, if Ada was marketed by a company,
the best approach might be to rename the technology with
some improvements. Then in the fine print say something
along the lines of "The X language was based primarily
upon the lessons learned from Ada".  Then the press,
might view this as an exciting new technology and get
the printing presses rolling again.

As it stands now, the press too often remembers it as
a "has been". Any technical writers are often too steeped
in C/C++, to give it any credit, which also works against it.

Just my $0.02 for today.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg